Abstract
Environmentally adaptive power generation is attractive for the development of next-generation energy sources. Here we develop a heterogeneous moisture-enabled electric generator (HMEG) based on a bilayer of polyelectrolyte films. Through the spontaneous adsorption of water molecules in air and induced diffusion of oppositely charged ions, one single HMEG unit can produce a high voltage of ~0.95 V at low (25%) relative humidity (RH), and even jump to 1.38 V at 85% RH. A sequentially aligned stacking strategy is created for large-scale integration of HMEG units, to offer a voltage of more than 1,000 V under ambient conditions (25% RH, 25 °C). Using origami assembly, a small section of folded HMEGs renders an output of up to 43 V cm−3. Such integration devices supply sufficient power to illuminate a lamp bulb of 10 W, to drive a dynamic electronic ink screen and to control the gate voltage for a self-powered field effect transistor.
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The data that support the findings of this paper are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (no. 2017YFB1104300), the National Science Foundation of China (nos. 22035005, 52022051, 22075165, 52073159 and 52090030), Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program (no. 2019Z08QCX08), NSFC-STINT (no. 21911530143), the State Key Laboratory of Tribology (no. SKLT2021B03) and Tsinghua-Foshan Innovation Special Fund (no. 2018THFS0412). This work is also supported by grant no. 2019GQG1025 from the Institute for Guo Qiang, Tsinghua University.
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L.Q., H.C. and H.W. designed the experiments. H.W., H.C. and T.H. performed the experiments. Y.H. conducted computational studies. H.W., Y.S., D.X., P.Y. and Y.Z. designed and characterized the self-powered FET. H.C. and C.L. gave advice on experiments. L.Q. and H.C. supervised the entire project. All authors discussed the results and reviewed the manuscript.
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Peer review information Nature Nanotechnology thanks Guihua Yu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–33, Discussion and Tables 1–6.
Supplementary Video 1
Integration of HMEG units by the sequentially aligned stacking method.
Supplementary Video 2
Dynamic electronic ink screen powered by integrated HMEGs.
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Wang, H., Sun, Y., He, T. et al. Bilayer of polyelectrolyte films for spontaneous power generation in air up to an integrated 1,000 V output. Nat. Nanotechnol. 16, 811–819 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-00903-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-00903-6
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