Self-adaptive Bioinspired Hummingbird-wing Stimulated Triboelectric Nanogenerators.

ABSTRACT: Bio-inspired technologies have remarkable potential for energy harvesting from clean and sustainable energy sources. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. The flutter is confined between two surfaces for contact electrification upon oscillation. We investigate the flutter mechanics on multiple contact surfaces with several free-standing and lightweight electrification designs. The flutter driven-TENGs are deposited on simplified wing designs to match the electrical performance with variations in wind speed. The hummingbird TENG (H-TENG) device weighed 10?g, making it one of the lightest TENG harvesters in the literature. With a six TENG network, the hybrid design attained a 1.5?W?m-2 peak electrical output at 7.5?m/s wind speed with an approximately linear increase in charge rate with the increased number of TENG harvesters. We demonstrate the ability of the H-TENG networks to operate Internet of Things (IoT) devices from sustainable and renewable energy sources.

SUBMITTER: Ahmed A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5719441 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature