Rib Stitch Knitted Extremely Stretchable and Washable Textile Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Abstract In recent years with developing wearable technologies, one of the challenges is energy consumption. Rechargeable or removable batteries are incompatible with wearable applications. Because the batteries are not flexible, foldable, stretchable, lightweight, and require substitutes or charges. Consequently, the best choice is self‐charging systems. The extremely stretchable and washable textile triboelectric nanogenerator (T‐TENG) is designed and fabricated in this work. It is knitted with a rib stitch technique by double twisted thread‐based. Subsequently, the rib stitch method is chosen to achieve the most stretchability and flexibility in this textile by investigating the knitting techniques. Likewise, the active triboelectric materials are polyvinyl chloride and polyamide 6. The maximum instantaneous peak power density is ≈18 mW m^‐2 and the measured output voltage and current are 29.2 V and 5.3 μA, respectively. Following this, the experimental test report on the index finger, the relationship between textile tension and voltage production, and the resulting wash and durability tests are provided. This work successfully demonstrates T‐TENG quite compatible with self‐power wearable applications, which can harvest energy from the ambient mechanical tensions and capable of supply power for low power systems in wearable electronics.