Venkateswaran Vivekananthan

By Venkateswaran Vivekananthan, Arunkumar Chandrasekhar, Nagamalleswara Rao Alluri, Yuvasree Purusothaman, Gaurav Khandelwal and Sang-Jae Kim

Scavenging energy from our day-to-day activity into useful electrical energy be the best solution to solve the energy crisis. This concept entirely reduces the usage of batteries, which have a complex issue in recycling and disposal. For electrical harvesting energy from vibration energy, there are few energy harvesters available, but the fabrication, implementation, and maintenances are quite complicated. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) having the advantage of accessible design, less fabrication cost, and high energy efficiency can replace the battery in low-power electronic devices. TENGs can operate in various working modes such as contact-separation mode, sliding mode, single-electrode mode, and free-standing mode. The design of TENGs with the respective operating modes employed in generating electric power as well as can be utilized as a portable and wearable power source. The fabrication of triboelectric layers with micro-roughness could enhance the triboelectric charge generation. The objective of this chapter is to deal with the design of triboelectric layers, creating micro structured roughness using the soft-lithographic technique, fabrication of TENGs using different working modes, energy harvesting performance analysis, powering up commercial devices (LEDs, displays, and capacitors), and portable-wearable applications.

Part of the book: Nanogenerators