Improving the Durability of Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is a revolutionary system for mechanical energy harvesting and self-powered monitoring and has opened great prospects for driving emerging electronics for our society. However, a big challenge preventing TENG’s practical applications is that TENGs often suffer damages from mechanical abrasion and/or contaminant adsorption resulting in significant decrease of performance and service life. Thus, the durable performance of TENGs is an important issue that urgently needs to be addressed. Until now, there are some studies on the investigation of this key topic for TENGs. In this chapter, we will review TENGs’ durability works based on material design and electrification interface, since triboelectricity properties of TENGs are mainly originated from materials’ properties and interfaces’ performance. It is highly believed that the durability of TENGs can be significantly boosted via the improvement of materials’ physiochemical properties, surface textures and functional groups, and interface structures and compositions. In terms of durability of TENGs, the features of long-term stabilities, service-life cycles, fiction coefficient, and wear loss are important quantifiably, which will be taken into consideration in this chapter.