Self-adaptive Bioinspired Hummingbird-wing Stimulated Triboelectric Nanogenerators

• Main Authors: Ahmed, Abdelsalam, Hassan, Islam, Song, Peiyi, Gamaleldin, Mohamed, Radhi, Ali, Panwar, Nishtha, Tjin, Swee Chuan, Desoky, Ahmed Y., Sinton, David, Yong, Ken-Tye, Zu, Jean
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Wing; Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG)
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87413; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44427
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Bio-inspired technologies have remarkable potential for energy harvesting from clean and sustainable energy sources. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. The flutter is confined between two surfaces for contact electrification upon oscillation. We investigate the flutter mechanics on multiple contact surfaces with several free-standing and lightweight electrification designs. The flutter driven-TENGs are deposited on simplified wing designs to match the electrical performance with variations in wind speed. The hummingbird TENG (H-TENG) device weighed 10 g, making it one of the lightest TENG harvesters in the literature. With a six TENG network, the hybrid design attained a 1.5 W m−2 peak electrical output at 7.5 m/s wind speed with an approximately linear increase in charge rate with the increased number of TENG harvesters. We demonstrate the ability of the H-TENG networks to operate Internet of Things (IoT) devices from sustainable and renewable energy sources.