Instantaneous Self-Powered Sensing System Based on Planar-Structured Rotary Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Abstract

Self-powering electronics by harvesting mechanical energy has been widely studied, but most self-powering processes require a long time in the energy harvesting procedure, resulting in low efficiency or even system failure in some specific applications such as instantaneous sensor signal acquisition and transmission. In order to achieve efficient self-powered sensing, we design and construct an instantaneous self-powered sensing system, which puts heavy requirements on generator’s power and power management circuit. Theoretical analysis and experimental results over two types of generators prove that the planar-structured rotary triboelectric nanogenerator possesses many advantages over electromagnetic generator for the circumstances of instantaneous self-powering. In addition, an instantaneous driving mode power management circuit is also introduced showing advanced performance for the instantaneous self-powering sensing system. As a proof-of-concept, an integrated instantaneous self-powered sensing system is demonstrated based on Radio-Frequency transmission. This work demonstrates the potential of instantaneous self-powered sensing systems to be used in a wide range of applications such as smart home, environment monitoring, and security surveillance.

A Review of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting: Materials, Design, and Readout Circuits

“…The latter, primarily in the form of wearable sensors, enable monitoring of human health and physiological performance by nonintrusive, continuous, and real-time assessment of human physiological parameters [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Depending on the type of energy conversion, nanogenerators can be classified as piezoelectric nanogenerators (PENG) [12][13][14], triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) [15][16][17][18][19], pyroelectric nanogenerators (PYNG) [20], thermoelectric [21,22], and solar cells [23,24].…”

Light-Weight, Self-Powered Sensor Based on Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Big Data Analytics in Sports

“…The Internet of Things (IoT) is a huge network integrated with sensors in order to interface with our daily lives through data exchanging [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Moreover, in recent years, much attention has been attracted to the capturing of physiological indexes by sensors in big data analytics in the field of sports [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. This modern science and technology contributes to improve the performance of athletes [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28].…”