Metal-Organic Frameworks for Textile based Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous materials composed of metal ion coordinated with an organic ligand. MOFs has numerous advantages including high surface area, tunable size, ease of post synthetic modifications, high porosity. Further MOFs offers specific pore size which can be advantageous for highly selective self-powered sensors based on triboelectric effect. However, majority of MOFs based TENG uses powders attached on the conductive tape by applying high pressure and blowing off the unattached particles. This widely used approach is unsuitable due to poor device reproducibility, repeatability and stability. Further, TENGs active layers designed by above method cannot be used for self-powered physical or chemical sensors. In case of physical sensors like pressure sensor, high pressure can lead to the transfer of material on the opposite contact layer. While in case of chemical sensors addition of analyte can lead to removal of material, thus making device unreliable. This work discusses the advantages and the challenges of MOFs for TENGs. Then MOFs are introduced for TENG based self-powered sensor applications with ZIF-8 based tetracycline sensor and Cu-Asp based thioacetamide sensor as examples. Finally, the talk will discuss the growth of MOFs on the textile substrates for TENGs, their triboelectric behaviour and potential for self-powered applications.