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Self-Powered Triboelectric Nanogenerators in Intelligent Food Packaging: Recent Advances and Applications
Zhongli Liu1, Feijie Wang1, Shiqiang Ouyang1
1Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Food Advanced Manufacturing Equipment Technology, School of Mechanical Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China.
Small (Weinheim an Der Bergstrasse, Germany)
|July 8, 2026
Summary
Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) offer self-powered intelligent food packaging solutions. This review explores TENG advancements for enhanced food quality, safety, and sustainability monitoring.
Area of Science:
- Materials Science
- Energy Harvesting
- Food Science
Background:
- Traditional food packaging struggles with power, data, and quality management challenges.
- Increasing demands for food quality, safety, traceability, and sustainability necessitate advanced packaging solutions.
- Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) provide a self-powered platform for energy harvesting and signal transduction in intelligent packaging.
Purpose of the Study:
- To review recent advancements in TENG-based intelligent food packaging.
- To discuss working mechanisms, material selection, structural optimization, and applications of TENGs in food packaging.
- To analyze challenges and propose future research directions for TENG-based food packaging.
Main Methods:
- Summarizing recent advances in TENG technology for food packaging.
- Discussing charge regulation, interface engineering, and device architecture.
- Reviewing applications integrating TENGs with various sensors (pressure, humidity, vibration, gas).
Main Results:
- TENGs enable self-powered monitoring of food during transportation, storage, and distribution.
- Integration with machine learning enhances data analysis, quality prediction, and decision-making.
- Recent advances focus on improving output performance, environmental robustness, and multimodal sensing capabilities.
Conclusions:
- TENG-based intelligent food packaging presents a promising approach for addressing current industry challenges.
- Further research is needed to overcome limitations in output, environmental adaptability, durability, and scalability.
- This review guides the development and industrialization of TENG technology for innovative food packaging solutions.
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