Ultrahigh sensitive, eco-friendly, transparent triboelectric nanogenerator for monitoring human motion and vehicle movement

Natural biomaterials based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is crucial for sustainable self-powered devices that achieves high outputs, biocompatibility, and reduces the environment impact. Meanwhile, transparent TENG can integrate with commercial optoelectronic devices to simultaneously realize the self-powering sensing and visual transmission of information. Herein, we prepared an eco-friendly, flexible, transparent chitosan@starch composite film by drop casting process, which reveals high transmittance exceed 88% in the visible light range. A transparent TENG was designed by pairing the chitosan@starch composite film with the fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) film, and transparent PET/ITO electrodes. The optimized chitosan@starch-FEP based TENG (CS-F/TENG) exhibits the open-circuit voltage of similar to 1080 V, short-circuit current of similar to 16.9 mA m(-2) and the maximum power density of similar to 5.07 W m(-2). Ultrahigh sensitivity of 46.03 V kPa(-1) in the pressure range of 1.25-6.25 kPa is achieved by the CS-F/TENG as a self-powered force sensor, and its potential applications in monitoring human motion and vehicles' speed are also demonstrated. Our work provides novel insights in the utilization of sustainable chitosan@starch composite film for transparent wearable TENG with decent output performance, and also facilitates the potential applications of this device in monitoring human motion and vehicle movement.