High output performance leather-based triboelectric nanogenerator by tuning charge trapping and transport

Improving the output performance of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) is a key to developing commercial applications. Here, a leather-based positive friction layer (LCF-PCOOH@PPy) was proposed by introducing carboxyl grafted polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (PCOOH) as active charge trapping sites and Polypyrrole (PPy) to improve charge transport properties. Then, a high-performance leather-based TENG was successfully fabricated. With the addition of PCOOH and PPy, the open circuit voltage of the leather-based TENG showed a sharp enhancement, rising from 75 V to 350 V. Leather-based TENG exhibited strong robustness, and the current attenuation was only 3.5 % after running 15, 000 cycles continuously. The output performance of the leatherbased TENG remained stable after 30 days of use. Besides, the fabricated device exhibited an extremely short response time and high sensitivity of 81 ms and 3.10 V x kPa(-1), when used as a self-powered sensing device. For hygiene issues of wearable devices, the antibacterial rate of LCF-PCOOH@PPy to S. aureus reached 99.5 %. In this study, PCOOH was proposed for the first time as the charge trapping site of the friction layer material to improve the output performance of TENG, which provided a new idea for the selection of functional materials.