Harvesting energy from natural water evaporation has been proposed as a promising alternative to supply power for self‐powered and low‐power devices and systems, owing to its spontaneous, ubiquitous, and sustainability. Herein, an approach is presented for harvesting water‐evaporation‐induced electricity based on liquid–solid triboelectric nanogenerators (LS‐TENGs), which has various advantages of easy preparation, substrate needless, and robustness. This developed harvester with porous Al2O3 ceramic sheet can generate a continuous and stable direct current of ≈0.3 µA and voltage of ≈0.7 V by optimizing the sheet physical dimensions and ambient parameters such as relative humidity, temperature, wind velocity, and ion concentration. The output power also can be improved significantly by series or parallel connection the harvesters, which has superior electrical compatibility and environmental suitability. The development of the water‐evaporation‐induced electricity harvesting shows many application prospects including power supply for digital calculator and charging capacitor. This research provides an in‐depth experimental study on water‐evaporation‐induced electricity harvesting based on LS‐TENGs and an efficient approach to supply electricity for low‐power devices.
Water droplets are ubiquitous in nature and harvesting droplet kinetic energy has attracted a great deal of attention to meet the increasing worldwide energy demands. In this work, we report a water droplet motion energy harvester with the wafer-level fabrication method, which is based on the water–solid surface contact electrical double layer effect. A theoretical model is established to illuminate the water droplet motion energy harvesting mechanism. Guided by the model, an energy harvester is developed based on Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems compatible process technology, which achieve a wafer-level fabrication. The output performance of the energy harvester has been optimized by decreasing the electrode width and its interval. Experimental results also show that the output voltage can be improved by increasing the droplet volume and decreasing the ionic concentration. The optimized energy harvester exhibits an open circuit output peak voltage of 57.5 mV. This research provides an in-depth theoretical study and a practical guidance on water droplet kinetic energy harvesting.
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