Scientists are helping in the drive to develop nanogenerator technology which can lead to “affordable” clothing capable of sensing how healthy we are.
- A team of scientists has used 3D printing techniques to create a new Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) design—which can then be customised through a series of liquids for the purpose of efficiently extracting energy from movements and for sensing.
- This has been done by academics at Loughborough University’s Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, who hope that their recent technological advancements can help them create clothing that will help measure activity levels and communicate with their surroundings.
- The project is now in the process of using this knowledge to develop wearable technology which picks up on a person’s natural movements to provide health data.
THE PROJECT: TENGs are a rapidly growing piece of technology which are becoming a leading candidate in developing future smart textile and health monitoring applications.
- 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.
- During the research, the scientists found several previously unknown trends in the output of TENGs which help broaden our understanding.
- The techniques help to significantly improve the performance of TENG, which can help them make these devices more efficient, smaller, and cheaper. The 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. Dielectric constant of the TENG—which measures a substance’s ability to store electrical energy within an electric field, is a decisive factor which 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.
- 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.
- However, the findings allow for altering the dielectric constant without interfering with any of the other properties. It is being seen as a tremendous breakthrough.
THE STUDY: The findings of the project have been published in Nano Energy.
- Dr Ishara Dharmasena, Senior Lecturer at Wolfson school, led the project. Rameesh Bulathsinghala, PhD student, contributed to this study.
