Nanogenerators: An emerging technology towards nanoenergy

Nanoenergy is a field of studying the small-scale, highly efficient energy harvesting, storage, and applications by using nanomaterials and nanodevices. Nanogenerators are developed to harvest these small-scale energies in the ambient environment, which were first invented in our group in 2006. In the past decade, we have developed nanogenerators based on piezoelectric and triboelectric effects for mechanical energy harvesting, and those based on pyroelectric and thermoelectric effects for thermal energy harvesting. We also explored other novel nanogenerators such as that based on ion streams. The proposed nanogenerators will facilitate the development of self-powered systems, which enables efficient energy utilization and sustainable operations of mobile devices for “smart” wearable technology, health monitoring, biomedical sensing, environmental protection, and even security.