Coaxial Hybrid Triboelectric Nanogenerator for Scavenging Multidirectional Mechanical Energy

Scavenging mechanical energy from ambient environment has been one of the most promising approaches to tackle global energy shortage for its marvelous abundance over the world. Yet harvesting such energy finely is rather challenging because of highly fragmentary property. Recently, efforts based on triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) made it no longer a dream to promote this progress. In this paper, a novel coaxial hybrid TENG (CH-TENG) with the integration of rubber core and elastic wavy shell is demonstrated, which can run in two distinguishing working modes to collect the mechanical energy from multiple directions. While operated by researchers manually, a maximum instantaneous output of 150 and 48 V of open-circuit voltage (V-OC), 2 mu A and 145 nA of short-circuit current (I-SC) can be reached under continuous off-axial pressing as well as axial stretching, respectively, sufficing to charge commercial capacitors and drive 20 light-emitting diode bulbs. Attributing to the elaborate design of structure, as-fabricated CH-TENG shows lots of merits such as remarkable durability, high portability, outstanding sensitivity, and superb directivity. All of these manifest its great competitiveness in upcoming green future.