Self-powered triboelectric nanogenerator buoy ball for applications ranging from environment monitoring to water wave energy farm

Water wave is a huge green energy source existing all around the world, but major portion of the water wave energy remains unexplored due to the harsh environment and lack of efficient technologies. Compared to the traditional water wave based electromagnetic generators, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) exhibits advantages of simple device configuration, light weight, wide material choice, low cost and easy scalability. In order to further improve the device robustness and efficiency of TENG for water wave energy harvesting, a highly symmetric 3D spherical-shaped water based triboelectric nanogenerator (SWTENG) is proposed here. It has a spherical shell frame with double-layer water based TENG on both its inner surface and outer surface. The SWTENG with water mass inside is ideally suitable for the water wave energy harvesting, since the 3D symmetric structure is more efficient for harvesting energy from random directions and the double-layer water based TENG design is less susceptible to water leakage. Additionally, the SWTENG can also be used for harvesting energy from various energy sources, such as 3D vibration, spinning, rotation and human motions, etc. Furthermore, the SWTENG can work as self-powered fishing sensor or can serve as power source for other sensors in environment monitoring on water surface, such as water temperature, water level, water pollution, etc. Due to the high adaptability and scalability, the SWTENG not only can be used as single energy source or self-powered sensor node, but also can be connected into large-scale network to harvest the wide-area water wave energy towards efficient energy farm.