Highly porous and thermally stable tribopositive hybrid bimetallic cryogel to boost up the performance of triboelectric nanogenerators

Summary There have been tremendous efforts made to investigate various materials to enhance the electrical performance of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) but there is still demand for some techniques to further enhance the performance of tribomaterials. Therefore, we fabricated a bimetallic hybrid cryogel via cheap and facile UV-radiation as well as in situ reduction method. Fabricated TENG device made up of porous hybrid bimetallic cryogel film containing silver and gold nanoparticles as tribopositive material and poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS) as a tribonegative layer with dimension of 1 × 2 cm 2 has the ability to produced output voltage of 262.14 V with current density of 27.52 mA/m 2 and 7.44 W/m 2 peak power density, which was sufficient to light up more than 120 white light emitting-diodes (LEDs). Porous and rough structure, interaction of nanoparticles was the reason behind the performance enhancement of tribopositive material. Thus, this study introduces a very stable and easily synthesized bimetallic hybrid cryogel as a tribopositive material to enhance the performance of tribomaterials to design high performance TENG devices.