More than energy harvesting – Combining triboelectric nanogenerator and flexible electronics technology for enabling novel micro-/nano-systems

The cutting-edge flexible electronics have experienced an explosion growth in the past decades, driving the traditional rigid devices evolve into soft, light, thin, durable and comfortable devices with more and more add-on functionalities. This rapid advancement of flexible electronics induces urgent demand of flexible and sustainable power source to overcome one of the bottlenecks of this technology. Triboelectric nanogenerators, since first invented in 2012, have become a promising energy harvesting technology during the past few years with significant development across the world, due to their diverse flexible/stretchable configurations, no material limitation and high output performance. Beyond energy harvesting, triboelectric nanogenerators can actively function as self-powered sensors and actuators to detect, monitor, interact and respond to the ambient changes induced by environment or human. These triboelectric devices can be key components to achieve sustainable functional systems. Therefore, the complementary marriage of triboelectric nanogenerators and flexible electronics yields a highly advanced technology to realize self-powered, flexible and smart functional systems. In this review, progress development of triboelectric nanogenerators and flexible electronics technology is firstly reviewed. Then various micro-/nano-systems enabled by the integration of triboelectric nanogenerators and flexible electronics technology are presented to show the feasibility to achieve sustainable functional systems. At the end, a future prospect of “all-in-one” multi-functional smart system is proposed under the same flexible platform towards convenient, miniaturized and sustainable micro-/nano-systems.