Water Energy Harvesting and Self‐Powered Visible Light Communication Based on Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Abstract Harvesting energy from water is desirable and promising for its universal availability and wide abundance on the earth. Here, we introduce a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with advantages of simple configuration and low cost, which not only can get energy from the water, but also can actively detect the location and velocity of the flowing water according to the electric output of the TENG. Besides, we can adjust the structure of the TENG to harvest wind energy and realize self‐powered rotating state monitoring. Moreover, our desirable TENG can be utilized to construct a self‐powered visible light communication (VLC) system for active monitoring, which can be used for wireless data transmission without an external power source. This work promotes the development of renewable energy harvesting based on TENGs, and has a great potential application in self‐powered wireless monitoring.