Stirling Engine-Inspired Parallel Triboelectric Nanogenerator Drives the Electro-Fenton Process

Abstract

Emerging technologies such as a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) can always draw beneficial inspiration from traditional industrial design and thus become more efficient in constructing self-powered electrochemical systems. Inspired by the Stirling engine, a cyclic reciprocating parallel triboelectric nanogenerator (CRP-TENG) is proposed by combining stacked triboelectric units for harvesting wind energy and driving the electro-Fenton degradation of dye wastewater. Different from the classical rotational TENG, the CRP-TENG can convert rotating motion into horizontally straight reciprocating motion and present higher output performance than that of the cyclic reciprocating series TENG under the same operating conditions. The CRP-TENG shows a very stable output over ∼9000 cycles in the electrochemical process, where corn straw biochar was used as an efficient electrolytic cathode material for the oxidation of methyl orange. This work not only proposes a high-performance design of the TENG but also extends more common bioderived carbon materials in the development of environmentally friendly electrochemical systems.