Chitosan biopolymer‐derived self‐powered triboelectric sensor with optimized performance through molecular surface engineering and data‐driven learning

Abstract

The state‐of‐the‐art triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are constructed with synthetic polymers, curtailing their application prospects and relevance in sustainable technologies. The economically viable transformation and engineering of naturally abundant materials into efficient TENGs for mechanical energy harvesting is meaningful not only for fundamental scientific exploration, but also for addressing societal needs. Being an abundant natural biopolymer, chitosan enables exciting opportunity for low‐cost, biodegradable TENG applications. However, the electrical outputs of chitosan‐based TENGs are low compared with the devices built with synthetic polymers. Here, we explore the facile molecular surface engineering in chitosan to significantly boost the performance of chitosan‐based TENG for enabling the practical applications, for example, self‐powered car speed sensor. The molecular surface engineering offers a potentially promising scheme for designing and implementing high‐performance biopolymer‐based TENGs for self‐powered nanosystems in sustainable technologies. We further explore for the first time the feasibility of data mining approaches to analyze and learn the acquired triboelectric signals from the car speed sensors and predict the relationship between the triboelectric signals and car speed values.

Advanced Wearable Thermocells for Body Heat Harvesting

“…The emergence of wearable electronic devices has stimulated the demand for a flexible, light-weight, and high-efficiency power supply system. [1,2] In contrast to more traditional energy storage systems (e.g., batteries [3] and supercapacitors [4] ), which require manual recharging, flexible energy harvesters (including solar cells, [5] piezoelectric polymer generators, [6,7] triboelectric generators, [8,9] and thermoelectric generators [10][11][12][13] ) convert energy from the local environment, including mechanical motion or temperature gradients from the human body, to electrical charge. [14,15] These energy harvesters are environmentally friendly power sources, which potentially provide a pathway toward the elimination of manual device charging and a reduction in battery waste.…”

Bio‐Derived Natural Materials Based Triboelectric Devices for Self‐Powered Ubiquitous Wearable and Implantable Intelligent Devices

“…In this review, we have provided a comprehensive review of the recent progress achieved for developing triboelectric devices based on bio-derived natural materials, which have been widely used for harvesting energies from human activities, [41,85,88,91,117] in vitro and in vivo biomedical sensing and treatments, [38,[94][95][96][97][98][102][103][104] etc. (Figure 8).…”

“…[85][86][87][88] Recently, many bio-derived natural materials based triboelectric devices have been reported for in vitro and in vivo applications with excellent biocompatibility and biodegradability. [12,[88][89][90][91] The utilization of otherwise wasted natural materials for harvesting the wasted mechanical energy is of interest not only for fundamental scientific exploration but also for fibroin or silkworm cocoon exhibit good conductivity and excellent performance for energy storage and wearable electronics. [126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133] For example, Mao and co-workers [126] developed a high-performance textile electrode, using an in situ polymerization method to enhance the doping levels of the polypyrrole (PPy) molecule and provide a dense and thin conductive polymer coating on the fabric surface.…”

“…[98,[175][176][177] Recently, chitin and chitosan have also been incorporated as the triboelectric materials in the triboelectric devices to realize cost-effective biodegradable mechanical energy harvesting. [12,35,41,91] Moreover, chitin and chitosan are effective biosorbents for effectively removing aquatic pollutants (e.g., heavy metal ions, organic dyes) in wastewater, owning to the high contents of hydroxyl and amino functional groups in chitin and chitosan. [178][179][180][181] For example, Salehi et al [178] reported that ZnO-chitosan nanocomposite could be used as an adsorbent for removing anionic dye (acid black 26 (AB26) and direct blue 78 (DB78)), where chitosan and ZnO promote the adsorption and degradation of dye molecules, respectively.…”

Triboelectric nanogenerator based on degradable materials

“…Recently, the animal‐based degradable materials with excellent triboelectric effect have been applied to the triboelectric layer of TENG. Since 2015, The silk fibroin, 19,43 gelatin, 44 and chitin 15,45‐47 have begun to emerge in DB‐TENG. These TENG using animal‐based degradable materials have appeared in broad areas such as energy harvesting, signal sensing, and invasive medical treatment.…”