Stretchable negative Poisson's ratio yarn for triboelectric nanogenerator for environmental energy harvesting and self-powered sensor

Due to the increasingly serious environmental pollution and the extreme shortage of energy resources, harvesting clean and sustainable random energy from the environment is a scientific, effective, and necessary solution in the coming intelligent era. Such random and disorder energy, like that from human motion and textile-related movement, can be obtained via textile-based triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs). However, research related to textile-based TENGs with mature, high-efficiency, and economical manufacturing techniques is limited. Here, by using a high-speed ring spinning method, negative Poisson's ratio yarn (NPRY) with a composite structure is designed and fabricated as a variety of intelligent device. Based on the special negative Poisson's ratio effect, NPRY combined with TENG can be used as a foundation structure to form diverse flexible textile-based electronic devices, such as an energy harvesting fabric, a self-counting yoga elastic band, and a self-powered pre-alarm cable. At the same time, NPRY-TENGs with different structures and structural parameters are systematically investigated to optimize the output performance in this work. This special, low-cost, and highly efficient NPRY as a foundation structure material has promising applications in the manufacture of all kinds of textile-based TENGs and harvesting a lot of random energy from the environment, where the random energy can be used by other electronic devices or those textile-based TENGs themselves as self-powered sensors.