Recent Progress of Nanogenerators for Green Energy Harvesting: Performance, Applications, and Challenges

Natural sources of green energy include sunshine, water, biomass, geothermal heat, and wind. These energies are alternate forms of electrical energy that do not rely on fossil fuels. Green energy is environmentally benign, as it avoids the generation of greenhouse gases and pollutants. Various systems and equipment have been utilized to gather natural energy. However, most technologies need a huge amount of infrastructure and expensive equipment in order to power electronic gadgets, smart sensors, and wearable devices. Nanogenerators have recently emerged as an alternative technique for collecting energy from both natural and artificial sources, with significant benefits such as light weight, low-cost production, simple operation, easy signal processing, and low-cost materials. These nanogenerators might power electronic components and wearable devices used in a variety of applications such as telecommunications, the medical sector, the military and automotive industries, and internet of things (IoT) devices. We describe new research on the performance of nanogenerators employing several green energy acquisition processes such as piezoelectric, electromagnetic, thermoelectric, and triboelectric. Furthermore, the materials, applications, challenges, and future prospects of several nanogenerators are discussed.