Highly Transparent, Stretchable, and Self-Healing Ionic-Skin Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Energy Harvesting and Touch Applications

Recently developed triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) act as a promising power source for self-powered electronic devices. However, the majority of TENGs are fabricated using metallic electrodes and cannot achieve high stretchability and transparency, simultaneously. Here, slime-based ionic conductors are used as transparent current-collecting layers of TENG, thus significantly enhancing their energy generation, stretchability, transparency, and instilling self-healing characteristics. This is the first demonstration of using an ionic conductor as the current collector in a mechanical energy harvester. The resulting ionic-skin TENG (IS-TENG) has a transparency of 92% transmittance, and its energy-harvesting performance is 12 times higher than that of the silver-based electronic current collectors. In addition, they are capable of enduring a uniaxial strain up to 700%, giving the highest performance compared to all other transparent and stretchable mechanical-energy harvesters. Additionally, this is the first demonstration of an autonomously self-healing TENG that can recover its performance even after 300 times of complete bifurcation. The IS-TENG represents the first prototype of a highly deformable and transparent power source that is able to autonomously self-heal quickly and repeatedly at room temperature, and thus can be used as a power supply for digital watches, touch sensors, artificial intelligence, and biointegrated electronics.

An ionic conductor is used for the first time as a current collector for a triboelectric nanogenerator, thus significantly enhancing its energy-harvesting performance, stretchability, transparency, and self-healing characteristics. The combination of transparency, stretchability, and self-healability makes it an ideal energy source for self-powered electronics and touch sensors, opening new possibilities for the utilization of triboelectric nanogenerators.

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