Sorry, but no one reads articles headed Triboelectric Energy Harvesting. For a million years, mankind has known about static electricity but only recently have we known how to make it power things. Carl Wilcke published the first triboelectric series in 1757. In 2012, Professor Zhong Lin Wang's group at Georgia Institute of Technology announced how to make static electricity into useful current by moving it back and forth, inducing AC in a circuit. They continue to set the pace. Together with researchers in China, Korea and elsewhere, they have invented enough variants of the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) to keep the engineers busy for a century.
Terminology is challenging: even the prefix tribo is a misnomer based on the Greek for drag. You can create the charge and indeed operate the favourite TENGs by nothing more than touching. Indeed, with some later versions you can just touch to create the charge then operate contactlessly.
Confusingly, T-TENG means both transparent TENG and transverse TENG. S-TENG means sliding mode or spiral versions. You can make a 3D-TENG FO-TENG FRD-TENG GF-TENG LM-TENG ME-TENG MG-TENG R-TENG or SR-TENG and put them in a TENG-NW meaning network. However, you cannot buy a useful one.
Humidity is the death of static charge yet researchers did a proof of principle for one square kilometer blankets over the sea generating a megawatt and they are making a self-powered robot camera navigating your wet insides. This triboelectric energy harvester inside a capsule endoscope can generate power from natural contractions of your gastrointestinal tract. "Grass" on your roof will generate wind energy but no, this year the Koreans showed that your bottom is the breakthrough. Bouncing up and down in a bus it lights the signage. To make that more respectable it is called a smart seat SS-TENG.
There are excellent summaries of the rapid academic progress including record-breaking parameters. What is the true situation in terms of feasibility and market potential for the devices and materials from an industrial point of view? Analyst IDTechEx has researched the first report on this with comparisons with the roadmaps for alternatives, interviews, forecasts and materials opportunities, identifying gaps in the market and impediments to be overcome. It is called Triboelectric Energy Harvesting (TENG) 2017-2027.
It does not project sales of lightning-driven pacemakers but it navigates the jargon and surfaces the big issues and opportunities with easily grasped infographics. This is a report for investors including the large materials companies seeking opportunities. It will assist those planning to use the devices and governments apportioning research funds. Those in green technology will be able to grasp the opportunity and the challenges without being blinded by mathematics.
After a self-sufficient Executive Summary and Conclusions for those who only have time for this, there is an introduction entirely aimed at commercialisation not history or nostalgia.
The Introduction then explains energy harvesting and specifically triboelectricity and the devices resulting, relating it to other forms of electrostatic and other energy harvesting to reveal lessons from the real world. The chapter on the Focus of Research summarises and assesses claims using detailed new comparison charts and infographics. Both individual TENG power sources and integrated TENG sensors are assessed. Chapter four is particularly thorough in addressing Commercialisation Opportunities for TENG Devices based on global visits and privileged data from PhD level IDTechEx analysts. For example, there is a table comparing the commercially desirable features of energy harvesting technologies and IDTechEx projections of many relevant markets are given in a chapter on Potential Applications - microwatts to watts, including wearables, microcontrollers, single board computers and the Internet of Things. The chapter on Applications from Ten Watts to Megawatts applies IDTechEx projections for electric vehicles land, water and air etc. to the triboelectric capability expected.
The report closes with a detailed chapter on materials opportunities relating needs to achievements to reveal gaps in the market. Then the interviews are exemplified in the last part of the report which comes with 30 minutes of free consultancy.
For more see www.IDTechEx.com/tribo.
