Fully Flexible Polyimide - Thermoplastic Polyurethane Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Energy Harvesting Applications

We report a simple fabrication, great performance and cost-effective triboelectric nanogenerator, which is based on a flexible vertical contact-separation mode based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). The TENG was fabricated using screen printing processes. Polyimide (PI) materials was used as a tribo-negative layer and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) was used as tribo-positive layer. The electrodes for TENG was fabricated by screen printing Ag ink on a flexible TPU and polyimide (PI) substrates for scavenging mechanical energy into electrical energy. The performance of the TENG was demonstrated by investigating the open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current and instantaneous consumed power on the resistive loads. It was observed that the open-circuit voltage was stabilized at 22 V with a short-circuit current of 12 µA. To demonstrate the vertical contact induced energy harvesting ability, the fabricated TENG device was attached to the shoe sock and shoe sole to harvest the energy from human motion.