Dripping liquid is one of the most common practices in chemistry, but one rarely thinks that the contact of liquid with air could introduce charges in the liquid, which may affect the chemical reaction. Here, we propose a functional dripping channel based on a liquid triboelectric nanogenerator (L-TENG) to effectively harvest energy from liquid droplets and sense their motion. The L-TENG is a hybrid of a grating-electrode L-TENG and a single-electrode L-TENG, which are for energy harvesting and sensing, respectively. When dripping from a funnel, the energy of the droplets can be successively harvested and stored. Meanwhile, the single-electrode L-TENG can identify the time interval for the liquid flow and the number of droplets, providing information on the chemical process. The device with enhanced energy harvesting and sensing functions should have great application prospects in intelligent laboratory systems and can also contribute to the optimization of the L-TENGs for harvesting liquid droplet energy.
Keywords: dripping channel; droplet; energy harvesting; intelligent chemistry; triboelectric nanogenerator.