Biomechanical Energy Harvesters Based on Ionic Conductive Organohydrogels via the Hofmeister Effect and Electrostatic Interaction

Abstract

The recent use of cryoprotectant replacement method for solving the easy drying problem of hydrogels has attracted increasing research interest. However, the conductivity decrease of organohydrogels due to the induced insulating solvent limited their electronic applications. Herein, we introduce the Hofmeister effect and electrostatic interaction to generate hydrogen and sodium bonds in the hydrogel. Combined with its double network, an effective charge channel that will not be affected by the solvent replacement, is therefore built. The developed organohydrogel-based single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator (OHS-TENG) shows low conductivity decrease (one order) and high output (1.02–1.81 W/m2), which is much better than reported OHS-TENGs (2–3 orders, 41.2–710 mW/m2). Moreover, replacing water with glycerol in the hydrogel enables the device to exhibit excellent long-term stability (four months) and temperature tolerance (−50–100 °C). The presented strategy and mechanism can be extended to common organohydrogel systems aiming at high performance in electronic applications.