A High-Performance Flag-Type Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Scavenging Wind Energy toward Self-Powered IoTs

Pervasive and continuous energy solutions are highly desired in the era of the Internet of Things for powering wide-range distributed devices/sensors. Wind energy has been widely regarded as an ideal energy source for distributed devices/sensors due to the advantages of being sustainable and renewable. Herein, we propose a high-performance flag-type triboelectric nanogenerator (HF-TENG) to efficiently harvest widely distributed and highly available wind energy. The HF-TENG is composed of one piece of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) membrane and two carbon-coated polyethylene terephthalate (PET) membranes with their edges sealed up. Two ingenious internal-structure designs significantly improve the output performance. One is to place the supporting sponge strips between the PTFE and the carbon electrodes, and the other is to divide the PTFE into multiple pieces to obtain a multi-degree of freedom. Both methods can improve the degree of contact and separation between the two triboelectric materials while working. When the pair number of supporting sponge strips is two and the degree of freedom is five, the maximum voltage and current of HF-TENG can reach 78 V and 7.5 μA, respectively, which are both four times that of the untreated flag-type TENG. Additionally, the HF-TENG was demonstrated to power the LEDs, capacitors, and temperature sensors. The reported HF-TENG significantly promotes the utilization of the ambient wind energy and sheds some light on providing a pervasive and sustainable energy solution to the distributed devices/sensors in the era of the Internet of Things.