Hello the beautiful people of Hive world. As a student in STEM sector, I am pleased to know that we have a science lover community here in the Hive community. Today I am going write a glimpse about my own research field. for being concerned about the general people I will give the brief about my research area. May later I will discuss the primary and the promising future in science.
As we know the energy crisis is inevitable for upcoming centuries unless we manage something to handle it. There is the underlying environmental pollutions with the burning fossil fuels or coals. And the nuclear waste are going to a great danger for living organs of the earth. So these kinds of 5troubles can hamper the ecological balanced and many disasters can change the climate that can be worse for the human being also. The most serious problems which are interrelated and implicate several destructive situations together resulting in the shrinking world ecosystem, world economy, and climatic imbalance.
In the 21st century, these issues are growing faster than the speed of the scientific revolution. At present, people must consider environmental pollution while solving the problem of energy exhaustion especially the fossils ones.
In order to reduce the consumption and pollution of fossil energy, scientists are working hard from various perspectives. Among all the introduced systems, the sustainable sources like solar power, wind energy, tidal forces can be great options. But still the efficiency with the cost-effectiveness and the waste materials are also crucial for them.
Recent steps on this ongoing race is the nanogenerators which are some tiny devices that can harvest any available mechanical energy into electrical energy in very small range. Though the power generation is not so high to compete the industry level supply but these nanogenerators have the capability to remove the batteries from the environment!
Many types of nanogenerators can be integrated with many portable electronic devices which are now need the batteries and thus the self-powered terms comes in the science. The self-powered microelectronic devices integrated nanogenerators as the energy conversion devices as built-in power supply units have become a research hotspot in many countries around the world.
Nanogenerators convert mechanical energy into electrical energy in the nanometer range and are the smallest generators in the world. The portable flexibility and low-cost fabrication process are the key advantages of these tiny energy-generating devices. With the fastest improvement in modern technology in recent years, the requirement of energy has been diversified in forms amount because of the thousands of microelectronic devices are deployed in numerous sensing networks to ensure a smooth and comfortable lifestyle in every aspect of our daily life. Due to the involvement of harmful and toxic chemicals in traditional energy supply and batteries, self-powered or low-powered devices have got an immense attraction for use in sensor systems worldwide.
One of mostly investigated nanogeneratorsTriboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is one of the most promising energy harvesting technology that can be an emerging source of energy supply in near future. The complete process of energy harvesting done through the triboelectric effect, a physics which I am not going to explain today to bother you. Recently TENG-based sensors have become very prominent in self-powered sensor networks. TENG has been investigated as an optimistic research spotlight for energy supply to portable low-powered electronic devices and industrial sensor systems. In addition, it can be deployed in biomedical and environmental applications by deploying biodegradable and bio-friendly materials in the fabrication process.
Besides TENG, many other energy scavenging devices based on piezoelectric, pyroelectric, thermoelectric, and photovoltaic effects, photocatalysis are being investigated for replacing the batteries and conventional energy sources from sensor networks. These energy harvesting techniques are being utilized in many self-powered sensors and portable electronic devices.
As in the figure, you can notice the lifetime of this nanogenerators which is very new. But within the short period of time, it has gained a tremendous attention from the world scientific community. And the recently introduced potential applications will amazed you. You can't imagine that the potential application can go further to this extends!
The journey of the nanogenerators starts with the concept of piezoelectric effect which is well known for many decades but the first piezoelectric nanogenerator was proposed in 2006 by Professor Zhong Lin Wang and his group in USA from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently a lot of research works has been carried away to design flexible nanogenerators based on piezoelectric, triboelectric, thermoelectric, and pyroelectric effects for wearable sensors for human being and also for the portable electronic devices for replacing conventional energy supply such as batteries or capacitors in some cases.
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And after the enormous research and investigations, the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) was introduced by Prof. Wang in 2012 from the same laboratory of the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. And this innovation has brought significant interest from the scientist in using the approach for scavenging mechanical energies which are commonly we ignore. These nanogenerators can generate electricity with the human motion like walking, movement of any muscle or very lower frequency which are so small to be consider for energy harvesting comparing with the conventional generators in power stations!
The hybridization of these nanogenerators with the mechanical, thermal, and solar energy harvesting and in vivo cardiac monitoring device based on TENG opens up diverse application areas for this promising technology. Most recently, a triboelectric nanogenerator based on an implantable symbiotic heart pacemaker device was fabricated in 2019 which demonstrated the capability of nanogenerators in biomedical science.
A tiny finger's movement can be detect with the nanogenerators and the different movement with different angle or frequency can be realized with the electrical signal from these nanogenerators which can be a great potential for using them in artificial intelligence (AI) in industries or in our practical life. The human–machine interfacing tactile sensor has been fabricated based on a triboelectric nanogenerator, which can be an excellent opportunity to develop artificial intelligence to upgrade it to the next level as nanogenerator makes the power supply network simpler to reduce the complication of the sensor devices implanted in robots.
Thank you for reading my post. Hope you have learned something new from here. I will catch you at the next.
