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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

NanoHarvest · Triboelectric Nanogenerators Printed from Composite Inks for Energy Harvesting

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-07-03 → 2025-07-02
EU contribution
€164,677
Participants
1
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Triboelectric Nanogenerators Printed from Composite Inks for Energy Harvesting

The development of scalable, sustainable energy harvesting technologies is central to Europe’s green and digital transition. Triboelectric nanogenerators offer a route to decentralised, low-cost energy generation from ambient motion, yet their adoption is limited by poor durability, complex fabrication, and reliance on fragile or unsustainable materials. This project has presented advances in three key areas: one, the creation of supply resilience as a key metric for electronic nanomaterials in Europe, identifying which materials are both high-performing and locally accessible, ensuring that the TENGs can be produced with European-sourced materials, two sustainable processing of carbon nanotubes and 2D materials in green solvents such as Cyrene, informing the formulation of printable, environmentally responsible nanomaterial inks, and three, engineering charge transport in 2D nanosheet networks, a critical bottleneck in triboelectric performance. Together, these works shape a vision for printable composite inks that are high-performing, scalable, and compatible with additive manufacturing. The project aims to demonstrate a fully printed TENG based on sustainable materials, highlighting its practical potential and broad impact across wearables, sensors, and mobility infrastructure.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Triboelectric nanogenerators have recently emerged as a very promising energy harvesting technique for transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy. Their emergence is especially timely as the world undergoes a sustainable energy revolution and these devices have successfully demonstrated energy harvesting from a vast range of applications from wind to wave to wearable textiles. Importantly, they can also be fabricated from common materials such as paper, polymers, and graphite. However, as most highly triboelectric materials are polymeric, they suffer from low currents and brittleness under friction, with high performances usually only achieved using complex materials with a large number of processing stages. These are major challenges that are preventing the widespread and long-term application of these devices. This project will simultaneously address all of these issues by developing a printable polymeric composite containing 1D carbon nanotubes (to improve both mechanical strength & electrical conduction) and 2D nanosheets of molybdenum disulphide (to improve the charge retention & operation lifetime) which, in combination with a paper-based tribopositive layer, will form the basis of a low-cost, high performance & robust triboelectric nanogenerator. Crucially, as this composite will be printable it will be compatible with scalable processes such as roll-to-roll or flexographic printing. Success here will be achieved by combining the applicant's expertise on printable nanomaterials with the supervisor's knowledge and background on triboelectric generation and energy-storage devices. We will also demonstrate the practical utility of these devices by printing a device capable of harvesting energy from a bicycle tyre under cycling conditions. The creation of an optimised ink in combination with additive manufacturing techniques means we will be easily able to print devices that can ultimately be integrated into a wide range of harvesting applications.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA · LisboaCoordinatorPortugal

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union