Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Self-Powered Wearable Sensors

As the Internet of Things becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, their large volume and need for periodic power replacement has highlighted how traditional batteries are unsustainable for the next generation of smart devices. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), which generate electricity from everyday mechanical motion, offer a promising alternative, but further improvement of the output performance is still required for usage toward practical applications. This study investigates if silica derived from tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) can improve the performance of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a common electron accepting material used in TENGs, through their electron-attracting abilities. A layer of PDMS and three configurations of silica-PDMS composites were tested against human skin in ten repeated trials, recording the maximum voltage in each. By taking the average of the maximums, the preliminary results suggest that adding silica did not improve the performance of PDMS, decreasing the average voltage output by 50% - 88%. Specifically, the configurations with silica particles after gelation decreased the performance the most (76% - 88%), whereas mixing PDMS with silica before gelation decreased the performance by 50%. Thus, more experiments and tests should be conducted in that direction to confirm if silica can improve the performance of PDMS. If optimized, TENGs featuring silica-PDMS composites could offer efficacy with human skin, high flexibility, and biocompatibility, opening the door to wearable electronics, biomedical sensors, and more. Furthermore, their scalability, low cost, and energy generation performance make it applicable to civil engineering applications, such as harvesting electricity from transportation and foot movement, contributing to a sustainable future.