Liquid-solid triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has been great attention as a promising electricity generation method for renewable energy sources and self-powered electronic devices. Thus, enhancing TENG performance is a critical issue to be concerned for both practical and industrial applications. Hence in this study, a high-output liquid-solid TENG is proposed using a polyvinylidene fluoride surface polarization enhancement (PSPE) for self-powered streamflow sensing, which shows many advantages, such as adapt to the sensor energy requirement, multiple parameters sensing at the same time, eliminate the influence of ion concentration. The TENG based on PSPE film has the maximum power density of 15.6 mW/m2, which is increased by about 4.7 times compared to commercial PVDF-based TENG. This could be attributed to the increase of the dielectric constant and hydrophobic property of the PVDF film after the surface polarization enhancement process. Furthermore, the PSPE-TENG-driven sensor can simultaneously monitor both the physical and chemical parameters of the streamflow with high sensitivity and minimum error detection, which proves that the PSPE-TENG has enormous potential applications in self-powered streamflow sensing.
Keywords: polyvinylidene fluoride; self-powered; streamflow; surface polarization; triboelectric nanogenerator.