Self-Powered Water Disinfection System Acheving a Novel Oxidation-Assisted Electroporation Mechansim with Rotational Triboelectric Nanogenerator

In world, one of three people lack reliable access to clean water and water-borne diseases resulting from pathogenic microbescontaminated water remain a great threat to public health. Disinfection is an effective drinking water purification method; however, the most commonly used water disinfection method, chlorination, is limited by carcinogenic disinfection byproducts formation. Alternative methods such as ultraviolet (UV) radiation and membrane filtration suffer from drawbacks such as pathogen regrowth, low throughput, and intensive energy/chemical consumption. In addition, the methods have a limited disinfecting capacity and may be inadequate during a crisis like in cases of a severe epidemic outbreak, such as coronavirus disease 2019. Here, we report a rapid, self-powered water disinfection system for both bacterial and viral inactivation based on a novel oxidation-assisted electroporation mechanism powered by a supercoiling-mediated rotational TENG (S-TENG) that converts the periodic hand stretching/releasing into high-speed rotation. Owing to a rational design of the S-TENG that yields an ultrafast rotation (≈7500 rpm), we successfully overcame the insufficient output limitations of TENG caused by the low-frequency stimuli ambient energy harvesting. The S-TENG with sufficient voltage and current output can generate an NW-enhanced localized electric field and oxidative species simultaneously, and therefore achieving high disinfection efficiency. More than 99.9999% of bacteria and viruses were inactivated at a high flux of 15 m3 h–1 m–2. Our work presented an efficient enlarged demonstrator wherein 1 L of natural water can flow through the whole system within 1 min solely driven by gravity, and achieve complete disinfection, confirming the feasibility of this method for water disinfection in areas with an inadequate power supply. Figure 1