Overview of Power Management for Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Abstract

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have demonstrated enormous potential applications for acquiring human motion energy and ambient mechanical energy, which is the foundation of energy for the new era. However, with alternating current (AC) pulse and huge inherent impedance, the TENGs usually exhibit low‐energy supply efficiency when either powering conventional electronics or charging energy storage devices directly. Efficient power management has always been a technical bottleneck for the TENGs toward practical applications in self‐powered microsystems. Over the past years, several strategies of power management have been proposed, such as rectification, electromagnetic transformation, capacitive transformation, and direct current (DC) conversion, which can be used for voltage regulation, impedance matching, and efficiency improvement for electronics. Herein, the recent advances on power management for TENGs are systematically reviewed and analyzed, which has exhibited manageable triboelectric power by electronics as an important research issue of TENGs. Finally, the existing challenges and future perspectives in this field are discussed.

Keywords

• energy for the new era
• power management
• power tribotronics
• self-powered microsystems
• triboelectric nanogenerators