Self-adaptive Bioinspired Hummingbird-wing Stimulated Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Abdelsalam Ahmed; Islam Hassan; Peiyi Song; Mohamed Gamaleldin; Ali Radhi; Nishtha Panwar; Swee Chuan Tjin; Ahmed Y Desoky; David Sinton; Ken-Tye Yong; Jean Zu

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-17453-4

Self-adaptive Bioinspired Hummingbird-wing Stimulated Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 7;7(1):17143. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-17453-4.

Authors

Abdelsalam Ahmed¹, Islam Hassan^{2

3}, Peiyi Song⁴, Mohamed Gamaleldin⁵, Ali Radhi², Nishtha Panwar⁴, Swee Chuan Tjin⁴, Ahmed Y Desoky^{6

7}, David Sinton⁸, Ken-Tye Yong⁴, Jean Zu⁹

Affiliations

¹ NanoGenerators and NanoEngineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G8, Canada. ahmedry@mie.utoronto.ca.
² NanoGenerators and NanoEngineering Laboratory, School of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G8, Canada.
³ Design and Production Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, 11535, Egypt.
⁴ School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
⁵ Electrical & Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.
⁶ Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L3G1, Canada.
⁷ Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Hail, Hail, Saudi Arabia.
⁸ School of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G8, Canada.
⁹ Schaefer School of Engineering & Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, USA.

Abstract

Bio-inspired technologies have remarkable potential for energy harvesting from clean and sustainable energy sources. Inspired by the hummingbird-wing structure, we propose a shape-adaptive, lightweight triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed to exploit the unique flutter mechanics of the hummingbird for small-scale wind energy harvesting. The flutter is confined between two surfaces for contact electrification upon oscillation. We investigate the flutter mechanics on multiple contact surfaces with several free-standing and lightweight electrification designs. The flutter driven-TENGs are deposited on simplified wing designs to match the electrical performance with variations in wind speed. The hummingbird TENG (H-TENG) device weighed 10 g, making it one of the lightest TENG harvesters in the literature. With a six TENG network, the hybrid design attained a 1.5 W m^-2 peak electrical output at 7.5 m/s wind speed with an approximately linear increase in charge rate with the increased number of TENG harvesters. We demonstrate the ability of the H-TENG networks to operate Internet of Things (IoT) devices from sustainable and renewable energy sources.