High performance sound driven triboelectric nanogenerator for harvesting noise energy

Sound energy is one kind of the most widely distributed energies in the environment. Harvesting the sound energy, reducing noise and converting it into electricity have great potential to power nano/microsensors for internet of things, structure monitoring, environment monitoring, etc. Based on electrospun polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) nanofibers, we have fabricated a sound driven triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that can work stably in broad bandwidth ranging from 50 Hz to 425 Hz. Its maximum output current reaches up to 0.45 mA and its charging rate is 61 μC/s. Furthermore, the TENG continuously worked for 7 days and vibrated 100 million cycles, no decay in output signal was observed. The high performance and good robustness provide with great prospect to scavenge the noise energy in environment.