Triboelectric Nanogenerators (TENGs) are versatile, self-powered, active sensors that convert mechanical energy from stimuli like pressure, vibration, and impact into electrical signals, enabling real-time monitoring without external power sources. They are highly sensitive, low-cost, and scalable, making them ideal for human-machine interfaces, electronic skin, and industrial monitoring. Along this, capture and conversion of residual kinetic energy from ambient through triboelectric nanogenerators represents a great source electrical energy in a sustainable way. In this work, TENGs devices based on conventional but triboelectrically efficient materials have been developed, demonstrating competitiveness with existing ones built on current innovative nanostructured materials. With a PVC-PU based device of 20 cm in length it has been obtained 130 mW/m 2 of output power at a sliding cycle rate of 5 Hz. In this sense, by harvesting mechanical energy during 10 min, it has simultaneously been powered up a hygrometer and LCD clock for 6.5 h. Likewise, the reported TENGs hold an excellent working robustness in harvesting kinetic energy. After a continuous coaxial sliding of more than 1 million cycles, there is no observable electric output degradation. Thereby, by avoiding the use of complex and out of reach innovative materials, present proposal not only enables a broad TENGs technology access due to mass production and established processes of conventional plumbing materials but also opens a route towards batteryless power autonomy by providing a reliable and affordable electricity supply for low power consumption electronic devices.
Navarro-Segura et al. (Wed,) studied this question.