Development of sustainable TENGs for applications in smart energy harvesting textile

• Main Author: Yeo, Sera Jing Ying
• Other Authors: Lee Pooi See
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Materials
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/156353
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Biodegradable materials for triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have gained much interest in recent years due to the world’s focus on green energy. This has also led to the exploration of using natural materials since they are often biodegradable/biocompatible and environmentally friendly. In this paper, we study the possibility of using pectin, together with poly vinyl alcohol (PVA) as a material for using triboelectrification to harvest energy. These two materials are both biodegradable; pectin being a natural material and PVA being a biodegradable synthetic material. PVA and pectin were blended and casted to obtain films which are then used to fabricate the TENGs. At the optimum conditions, it has been found that the PVA/pectin TENGs could generate an output voltage of ~15V and an output current of ~0.3 μAusing the vertical contact-separation mode. The thermal stability of PVA/pectin films have also been assessed to find out its behaviour under certain temperature ranges. The findings revealed that pectin has improved the thermal properties of the films to a certain extent. Therefore, this paper shows that TENG constructed with PVA/pectin can offer a new alternative to greener means of harvesting energy.