Triboelectric energy harvesting using an origami-inspired structure

In this work, the design, fabrication and test of a novel Origami-inspired triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) are presented. The excellent performance of the proposed Origami-TENG is attributed to its stacked architecture and, thereby, the enlarged effective contact area. The mechanism of effective area enlargement is explained through mathematical proof. The strips used to fabricate the Origami structure are engineered with three layers. For one of the three-layered strips, the top and bottom layers are triboelectric materials with strong negative charge affinities. The middle layer is made of conductive material to constitute the electrode for collecting and guiding the charges induced on the surfaces of the triboelectric materials. The other three-layered conductive strip plays the role of the electrode with a middle polymer layer to provide high flexibility. The performance improvement is validated by the experimental results. Under a periodic tap excitation, the root-mean-square voltage of the proposed Origami-TENG is much larger than that of a conventional counterpart. Moreover, it has been found that by increasing the tapping speed and force, the voltage output from the proposed Origami-TENG can be increased. According to evaluation, the proposed Origami-TENG can produce a power output of around 200 μW. In two application tests, the proposed Origami-TENG can easily light up 28 LEDs and generate sufficient energy in about 40 s to power an electronic device - ViPSN, i.e., a programmable Internet-of-Things sensor node.