A Stretchable and Transparent Nanocomposite Nanogenerator for Self-Powered Physiological Monitoring

Abstract

Smart sensing electronic devices with good transparency, high stretchability, and self-powered sensing characteristics are essential in wearable health monitoring systems. This paper innovatively proposes a stretchable nanocomposite nanogenerator with good transparency that can be conformally attached to the human body to harvest biomechanical energy and monitor physiological signals. The work reports an innovative device that uses sprayed silver nanowires as transparent electrodes and sandwiches a nanocomposite of piezoelectric BaTiO and polydimethylsiloxane as the sensing layer, which exhibits good transparency and mechanical transformability with stretchable, foldable, and twistable properties. The highly flexible nanogenerator affords a good input-output linearity under the vertical force and the sensing ability to detect lateral stretching deformation up to 60% strain under piezoelectric mechanisms. Furthermore, the proposed device can effectively harvest touch energies from the human body as a single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator. Under periodic contact and separation, a maximum output voltage of 105 V, a current density of 6.5 μA/cm, and a power density of 102 μW/cm can be achieved, exhibiting a good power generation performance. Owing to the high conformability and excellent sensitivity of the nanogenerator, it can also act as a self-powered wearable sensor attached to different parts of the human body for real-time monitoring of the human physiological signals such as eye blinking, pronunciation, arm movement, and radial artery pulse. The designed nanocomposite nanogenerator shows great potential for use in self-powered e-skins and healthcare monitoring systems.

Triboelectric Nanogenerator: A Foundation of the Energy for the New Era

“…The material www.advancedsciencenews.com modification strategy can be further divided into chemical surface functionalization and bulk composition manipulation. High dielectric constant materials such as BaTiO 3 and SrTiO 3 have been widely used as fillers to enhance TENG performance, [50][51][52] which is also supported by theoretical studies of the dielectric effect on TENG. [47][48][49] For example, Wang et al demonstrated the use of self-assembled monolayers, thiols, and silanes, to modify the surfaces of conductive material Au and dielectric material SiO 2 , respectively (Figure 5a-i).…”

3D printing with light: towards additive manufacturing of soft, electroactive structures

“…(Silver nanowires are a possible candidate for making soft, transparent electrode materials 6,7 that might be UV curable but no such formulation was attempted, mainly due to the high cost of silver nanowires.) We therefore investigated an alternative approach that does not require deposition of an electrode material at all.…”

Nanogenerator-Based Self-Powered Sensors for Wearable and Implantable Electronics

“…The sensors contained three parts: one substrate of an ultrathin polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one piezoelectric layer of a PZT thin film, and an Au-integrated electrode formed on the PZT film ( Figure 2 (3) Others. As shown in Figure 2(c), an innovative device was prepared with silver nanowires, BaTiO 3 , and polydimethylsiloxane [59]. The devices exhibited great transparency and flexibility.…”