Cellulose for Sustainable Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are an emerging technology capable of converting the ambient mechanical energy into electricity, promising for complete utilization of the distributed energy to improve the quality of human life. However, realizing material innovation for good trade-off between the high triboelectric output and environment friendliness remains huge challenge, but it is of great importance for sustainable development of TENGs. Cellulose is a typical natural polymer that promises to address the challenge. Herein, the sustainable TENGs that originate from cellulose and potentially back to the natural world are focused on, realizing on-spot TENGs. First, the sources, forms, morphologies, structures, and modifications of cellulose are systematically summarized, indicating the commercial and noncommercial cellulose materials' potential for TENGs' application. Second, the dominating additive properties of cellulose such as hydrophobicity, self-cleaning, corrosion resistance, optical transparency, electrical conductivity, and degradability are introduced, which can effectively steer the development of TENGs. Thereafter, the TENGs with tailorable functions enabled by less-refined cellulose and various physical/chemical modified cellulose are reviewed, as well as plants-supported on-spot TENGs with environment adaptivity and transient property, embracing a sustainable future of versatile cellulose to adapt the distributed network of multiscenario TENGs for energy management and information communication.