All-in-one cellulose based hybrid tribo/piezoelectric nanogenerator

Abstract

Aybrid tribo/piezoelectric nanogenerators (HTPENG) have been proven to be highly efficient and versatile as far as the collection and conversion of ambient energy are concerned, and the introduction of flexible and green materials is a key step for their potential applications. Here, we developed a HTPENG by using nitrocellulose nanofibril paper as the triboelectric layer and BaTiO3/MWCNT@bacterial cellulose paper as the piezoelectric layer. The output of the triboelelctric paper has considerable performance as fluorinated ethylene propylene, and the output of piezoelectric paper is more than ten times higher than the BTO/polydimethylsiloxane structure. The integrated outputs of the sandwich structured HTPENG are 18 V and 1.6 µA·cm−2, which are capable of lighting up three LED bulbs and charging a 1 µF capacitor to 2.5 V in 80 s. In addition, the voltage signal generated by the HTPENG in contact-separation mode can be used for dynamic pressure detection. The linear range of dynamic pressure is from 0.5 to 3 N·cm−2 with a high sensitivity of 8.276 V·cm2 N−1 and a detection limit of 0.2 N·cm−2. This work provides new insights into the design and application of cellulose-based hybrid nanogenerators with high flexibility and simple structure.