A team of researchers from Loughborough University’s Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering has used 3D printing to develop a new nanogenerator technology that could be used to create affordable ‘smart clothing’ that could be used for health monitoring. The new triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) design can be customised using different liquids to efficiently extract energy from movement, which can then be used for sensing.
‘TENGs are a rapidly growing piece of technology that are becoming a leading candidate in developing future smart textile and health monitoring applications, said senior lecturer Ishara Dharmasena. ‘The finding of this study, which provides detailed insights into how these devices can be made more efficient and effective, directly feeds into our efforts to develop technologies such as “super-smart textiles”, leading to a promising future with advanced and sustainable wearables.’
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‘During our research, we have found several previously unknown trends in the output of TENGs that help broaden our understanding, said PhD student Rameesh Bulathsinghala. ‘The techniques we introduced help to significantly improve the performance of TENG, which can help us make these devices more efficient, smaller and cheaper. Our target is to use these results to create impactful and affordable practical applications such as wearable health monitoring systems in the near future.’
‘One of the key factors for the future success of this technology is to understand and work out how best to design the TENG, so that they can provide us with the best possible electrical performance,’ Dharmasena added. ‘[The] dielectric constant of the TENG – which measures a substance’s ability to store electrical energy within an electric field – is a decisive factor that need to be engineered during this design process. As there is little knowledge on how the dielectric constant can be tuned to control TENG electrical outputs, understanding the real impact of it within this space has been particularly difficult experimentally, as it is a unique property for a given material.
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‘Changing the dielectric constant would typically mean changing the material or doing significant modifications, which changes many other properties, such as surface area and charge density. This creates a lot of complexity in their design process,’ Dharmasena concluded. ‘However, our findings allow us to alter the dielectric constant without interfering with any of the other properties – it’s a tremendous breakthrough.’
The research has been published in Nano Energy.