Triboelectric Nanogenerator Using Microdome-Patterned PDMS as a Wearable Respiratory Energy Harvester

The need to recharge and eventually replace batteries is increasingly significant for operating a variety of wearable electronic devices. Rapid advances in low power design have stimulated the requirements for portable and sustainable power sources, thus opening the possibility of using human biomechanical energy as a promising alternative power source. Respiration is a unique form of spontaneous and stable source of human biomechanical energy that is currently untapped, and has the potential to be converted to a sustainable power source for low power wearable electronic devices and integrated body sensor networks. However, effectively harvesting respiration energy characterized by low frequency and low force is currently a technological challenge, and cannot be well-achieved by classical energy harvesting methods. In this work, a triboelectric nanogenerator based on contact-separation mode is demonstrated as a small and light-weight wearable respiratory energy harvester (wREH). The wREH can also be utilized as a self-powered respiratory motion sensor capable of tracking rate and depth of respiration. A simple and cost-effective poly lactic-co-glycolic acid patterning technique is utilized to create microdome-patterned polydimethylsiloxane for increasing the effective contact area of the triboelectric surfaces, thus enhancing power output while achieving higher durability than existing nanosurface structures.