Bio-inspired water-driven electricity generators: From fundamental mechanisms to practical applications

• DOI: 10.26599/nre.2023.9120042
• Publication Date: 2022-11-07T07:03:21Z
• Authors: Kaiqiang Wang; Wanghuai Xu; Wei Zhang; Xiong Wang; Xiao Yang; Jianfeng Li; Hanli Zhang; Jinjin Li; Zuankai Wang
• Keywords: Energy transformation

Harvesting water energy in various forms of motion, such as evaporation, raindrops, river flows, ocean waves, and other, is promising to relieve the global crisis reach aim carbon neutrality. However, this highly decentralized distributed poses a challenge on conventional electromagnetic hydropower technologies that feature centralization scalization. Recently, problem has been gradually addressed by emergence myriad electricity generators take inspiration from natural living organisms, which have capability efficiently process manage for survival competition. Imitating liquid–solid behaviors manifested ubiquitous biological processes, these allow efficient conversion water–solid interaction into charge transfer or electrical output under driving, gravity solar power. spite rapid development field, fundamental understanding their ability bridge gap between fundamentals practical applications remains elusive. In review, we first introduce latest progress bio-inspired harvesting forms, ranging droplet wave flow, then summarize engineering design generator applications, including self-powered sensor wearable electronics. Finally, prospects urgent problems, how achieve large-scale generation, are presented.