Design and development of triboelectric blue energy harvester

Abstract

Numerous energy sources like vibration, rotation, spinning, human motion and energy from water wave are being explored for harvesting energy. In this work, Tribo-electric Blue Energy Harvester (TeBEH) has been developed in which water waves i.e. blue energy is used as an energy source. It is preferred due to its enormous and environmentally friendly source of energy. The most of the portion of energy from water wave remains unexplored because absence of efficient advancements. Despite the fact that the conventional water wave based electromagnetic generators are well studied and developed, however, triboelectric nanogenerator has numerous advantages ranging from minimal cost to simple device fabrication. There is a lot of kinetic energy in ocean waves which can be harvested. The structure is made up of acrylic box with copper and aluminum as electrodes in combination with triboelectric material as a dielectric for triboelectrification. Gold nanoparticles (Au-NPs) were grown and embedded in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) layer to enhance surface charge density in triboelectric layers. The various combinations of tribo-material with electrodes are used to trap the optimized energy. It has been observed that the maximum electric potential of Vpp= 5.10 Volts/Vrms = 2.16 Volts was harvested for (Cu-Au-PDMS)-Cu layer.