Durability Improvement of Breeze‐Driven Triboelectric‐Electromagnetic Hybrid Nanogenerator by a Travel‐Controlled Approach

Abstract

Abstract Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), as an emerging technology for distributed energy harvesting, provides a promising energy solution for self‐powered environmental monitoring. However, the abrasion of triboelectric materials lowers the output performance of TENGs, severely limiting their practical applications. Herein, a novel travel‐controlled approach, by combining a gear train and cam switch, is proposed to reduce the mechanical wear. The automatic switching between the contact and non‐contact modes can be achieved in a tunable frequency, showing excellent electrical stability by maintaining 90% of electric outputs after continuous operation for 80 h (1 920 000 cycles). Meanwhile, based on the structural optimization, the power density per unit wind speed of the travel‐controlled TENG (TC‐TENG) is doubled as compared with that of previous related works. Moreover, by integrating the triboelectric‐electromagnetic hybrid device with an energy management circuit, a self‐powered close‐looped environmental monitoring and alarming system are demonstrated. Under breezy conditions (below 3 m s −1 ), the system can detect the environmental information continuously and steadily, and transmit it wirelessly to a mobile device. This work renders a novel approach to reducing the wear in TENGs toward self‐powered wireless sensing systems, showing broad application prospects in distributed unmanned environmental monitoring, smart farming, and Internet of Things.