High-resolution TENGS for earthquakes ground motion detection

Abstract

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Towards a deeper consciousness of the human being in preserving the natural environment of our planet, huge effort is nowadays being exerted by scientists all over the world to use green and free energy. The main motivation for this effort is to protect humanity, today and in the future, from the big natural disasters that often affect the poorest areas of the globe. In this work, TENGs (triboelectric nanogenerators) with an inertial mass on their surface are proposed to be used as self-powered seismic sensors (SEIS-TENGs) in the detection of seismic waves with global connectivity to the Internet of Things (IoT). For this purpose, various TENGs with several characteristics such as low cost, flame retardancy, and frequency-dependent sensitivity were fabricated with different materials such as Paper, Polyvinylalcohol (PVA), Polyvinyledenefluoride (PVDF) and PDMS. The TENGs based on PVA10PPA-PEI/PVDF exhibited the highest sensitivity of 280 Hz and the ones based on Paper/PDMS were very low cost and easy to manufacture. Pulses, artificially generated with an electro-mechanical machine operating in fatigue mode, were remotely transmitted by using LoRA communication protocol and could be monitored in the TTS (The Thing of Stack) platform. Finally, a realistic application of SEIS-TENG was carried out by simulating earthquakes with a triaxial shaking table and the seimsic waves were measured using SEIS-TENGs. Interestingly, they exhibited a similar response to the acceleration, velocity, and displacement, and with today’s commercial accelerometers such as micromechanical systems (MEMS). Furthermore, the number of quakes detected by SEIS-TENG was very similar to that of the MEMS. The results obtained demonstrate that the SEIS-TENGs are very promising to be employed in a global IoT seismic network. They will allow measuring ground oscillations to prevent the catastrophes caused by earthquakes.