Emerging Energy Harvesting Materials and Devices for Self‐Powered Water Disinfection

Abstract

Contaminated drinking water is one of the main pathogen transmission pathways making waterborne illnesses such as diarrheal diseases and gastroenteritis a huge threat to public health, especially in the areas where sanitation facilities and gird power are inadequate such as rural and disaster hit areas. Self‐powered water disinfection systems are a promising solution in these cases. In this review paper, the authors provide an overview of the new and emerging methods of applying energy harvesting materials and devices as a source of power for water disinfection systems microbial disinfection in water by harnessing ambient forms of energy such as mechanical motion, light, and heat into electricity. The authors begin with a brief introduction of the different energy harvesting technologies commonly applied in water disinfection; triboelectric, piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and photovoltaic effects. Various microbial disinfection mechanisms and types of device construction are summarized. Then, a detailed discussion of the energy harvester‐driven water disinfection process is provided. Finally, challenges and perspectives regarding the future development of self‐powered water disinfection are described.

Robust and multifunctional natural polyphenolic composites for water remediation

“…177 As such, various biological fungicides have This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2022 been explored as alternatives for water disinfection. 178,179 Among them, natural polyphenols offer unique advantages owing to their high antimicrobial activity, good biocompatibility, tunable physicochemical properties, and low environmental/human toxicity. And various antimicrobial materials based on natural polyphenols have been developed to obtain clean and safe water in recent years.…”

Smart Triboelectric Nanogenerators Toward Human‐Oriented Technologies: Health Monitoring, Wound Healing, Drug Delivery

“…Recently, the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has been considered a suitable device for bioapplications, [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] especially for the human body. [9,10,12,[14][15][16][17] There are three main aspects of TENGs that have drawn researchers' attention.…”

Microbial Disinfection with Supercoiling Capacitive Triboelectric Nanogenerator

“…[19] However, since the triboelectric energy harnessed from ambient energy sources including hand rotation, water/wind flow, and wave vibration can only drive the TENG for low-frequency stimuli (≈Hz), the current output is relatively low (<100 µA). [18][19][20] Consequently, recent studies have shown TENG-driven electroporation disinfection methods to be feasible only for small devices (electrode area <1 cm 2 ) with low throughputs (flow rate <10 mL min -1 ). [18,19,21] While the feasibility of such a system for POU disinfection with high throughputs requirement (≈L min -1 ) is still questionable due to the limitation of insufficient output current.…”