Yo-Yo Inspired Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Recently, as the demand for sustainable and renewable energy to power a large number of small electronics and sensors has increased, various mechanical energy harvesters such as electromagnetic, piezoelectric, and triboelectric generators have been highlighted because they have no environmental constraints to generate electricity and function as sustainable power sources. Among these generators, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), which produce electrical energy via triboelectrification and electrostatic induction, are a promising energy harvesting technology that can utilize existing materials or the structure of existing commercial products. Considering the vast number of independent portable electronics used today, the development of hand-driven TENGs is important. There is great demand for TENG considering both commercial product-inspired designs, which are the merit of TENG itself, and the hand-driven type. However, relevant studies are still lacking, and therefore further studies in these areas are required. In this study, we developed a novel triboelectric nanogenerator (Y-TENG) inspired by the Yo-Yo that can produce a sustainable electric output by hand motion input. One generator of Y-TENG produced a maximum VOC of 10 V and an ICC of 0.7 μA. Peak/root mean square (RMS) voltage output-based quantitative analysis for the optimized number of blades and dielectric material was performed. The proposed Y-TENG was able to continuously light up three light-emitting diodes (LEDs) while the Y-TENG moved up and down.