Self-Powered All-in-One Fluid Sensor Textile with Enhanced Triboelectric Effect on All-Immersed Dendritic Liquid-Solid Interface

Enormous interests have been attracted on exploiting interfacial triboelectric effects for sensor and energy applications but immensely limited by the inefficient liquid-solid electrification in terms of immersed applications in fluid. Here, we have presented a flexible self-powered all-in-one fluid sensor textile, for simultaneously monitoring the velocity, acceleration, and chemical composition based on an enhanced liquid-solid triboelectric effect. The textile was woven from flexible dendritic cable electrodes surrounded by arrays of micrometal dendrites, which could be further coated with a layer of polytetrafluoroethylene nanofibers. Even when completely immersed in the fluid, the textile can efficiently output a combined electric signal for parsing the velocity, acceleration, and chemical composition information. Furthermore, a textile of 6 cm² can charge a commercialized capacitor to 1 V within 80 s by harvesting flow energy on the liquid/solid interface, showing a potential use as the power supply of a signal-processing circuit. It has proposed a promising fluid sensor without extra power cables, for alerting possible leakage or blockage inside chemical and petroleum pipelines.

Highly-Efficient Dendritic Cable Electrodes for Flexible Supercapacitive Fabric

In the search for clothlike wearable energy-storage devices with both high energy density and high power density, metal fibers surrounded by micro metal dendrites, as current collectors, are either rooted inside a thick layer of carbon particles or wrapped with flowerlike nano NiO in a similar manner to the root or stem system of natural plants, to form dendritic cablelike negative or positive electrodes. These dendritic cable electrodes could be further combined or woven into flexible solid-type supercapacitive garland or fabric, together with cotton wires. Benefiting from the ultra large interface of the metal dendrites current collector, it can be charged up to 1.8 V, and give an energy density of 0.1408 mWh cm^-2 and a power density of 3.01 mW cm^-2, which is capable of directly starting a small electric car with a short and flexible piece of supercapacitor.