The review, led by Premkumar Sharad Bhosale of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology together with colleagues including Swati Panda, Dandugudumula Ramu, Sugato Hajra, Eunjoo Kim, and Hoe Joon Kim, surveys recent progress in TENG-based systems across machine fault detection, vibration monitoring, fluid flow control, air filtration, environmental monitoring, and mining safety. The authors emphasize that TENG devices are attractive for industrial deployment because they are self-powered, sustainable, inexpensive to fabricate, and compatible with flexible and even biodegradable materials. Their architecture can be tuned to many device layouts, and their electrical outputs integrate naturally with artificial intelligence and Internet of Things platforms, opening a path toward next-generation smart factories where sensors generate their own power and communicate autonomously.

At the heart of the technology is a simple physical mechanism. A typical TENG contains two dielectric layers with opposite triboelectric properties and two electrodes. When the layers come into contact, equal and opposite charges build at the surfaces. As the layers separate, electrons flow between the electrodes to balance the potential difference, producing a current. When the layers touch again, electrons flow in the reverse direction. This periodic motion generates an alternating electrical output that can be harvested, stored, and used to power small electronics. Researchers operate TENGs in four principal modes: contact-separation, single-electrode, lateral sliding, and freestanding. The freestanding mode is especially valuable for industrial use because the moving triboelectric layer never makes hard contact with the electrodes, minimizing surface wear and significantly extending device lifetime.

Among the most striking demonstrations is a vibrational TENG network developed by Li and colleagues for machine fault detection. The device stacked four contact-separation units with copper electrodes and polyethylene terephthalate triboelectric layers, producing an open-circuit voltage of 600 volts, a transferred charge of 0.85 microcoulombs, and a power density of 3.33 milliwatts per cubic meter. Connected through a power management module, microcontroller, and wireless transmitter, three self-powered vibration sensor nodes fed temperature and acceleration data into a support vector machine classifier, achieving 83.6 percent accuracy in detecting machine failures. The researchers point to smart factories, intelligent manufacturing, and continuous production monitoring as the most immediate applications for such networks.

Wind energy, often irregular and unpredictable inside industrial facilities, has also been harnessed. Zhang and co-workers built a turbine vent TENG integrating two freestanding-mode units and two contact-sliding-separation units on a conventional turbine vent. At a wind speed of seven meters per second, the device delivered 178.2 volts, a current of 38.2 microamperes, and 2.71 milliwatts of power, enough to light 120 green LEDs, charge a capacitor to drive a thermometer, and power a wireless alarm transmitter for early temperature warnings. In a complementary effort, Li and colleagues created a rotary wind-driven TENG that exploits the thermal response of nickel-titanium shape memory alloy to tune its contact area. At temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, the alloy flattens and changes the electrical contact configuration, allowing the device to serve as a self-powered airflow temperature alarm for wind-cooled transformers, delivering an average power density of 140 milliwatts per square meter at twelve meters per second and a wind speed sensitivity of 0.526 microamps per meter per second.

Fluid control represents another frontier. Wang and colleagues developed a flapping-film TENG in which a soft fluorinated ethylene propylene film flutters between copper electrodes as air passes through a nozzle chamber, generating up to 32 volts and 2 microamps. Paired with an Arduino microcomputer, stepper motor, and blower, the system sensed and actively regulated airflow, with smoke visualization experiments at a Reynolds number of 8000 confirming precise control over flow fields. The researchers see direct applications in air conditioning, refrigeration, and production processes where real-time flow management matters. Meanwhile, Kisomi and colleagues applied contact-separation TENGs to air filtration, building industrial filters and face masks from polypropylene-polyurethane pairs that generated 10 to 20 kilovolts under airflow velocities between 1 and 5 centimeters per second. The electrostatic charging captured particles as small as PM0.1 with removal efficiencies reaching 99 percent at low airflow velocities, offering self-powered protection against industrial particulate pollution.

Vibration monitoring, a cornerstone of predictive maintenance, has been advanced by Jaurker and colleagues, who used laser micro-texturing on fluorinated ethylene propylene and aluminum layers to build a TENG producing 794 volts, 44 microamps, and a power density of 2371.6 microwatts per square centimeter. Mounted with an energy harvesting module charging a small battery, the device powered a Wi-Fi microcontroller that wirelessly transmitted vibration signatures to smart devices, instantly registering when a shaker turned on and off. For broader environmental surveillance, Zhang and co-workers introduced a pulsed TENG architecture that increases internal capacitance through an external capacitor, enhancing charge density while limiting open-circuit voltage. Coupled with a power management circuit and an LTC3588 converter, the platform periodically measured light intensity, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure, transmitting data at intervals of seven minutes and thirty-five seconds. In mining, Liu and colleagues reported a triboelectric self-powered sensing platform in Nature Communications that detected wind speeds as low as 0.32 meters per second using a 3D-printed turbine with PTFE electret and conformal spiral electrodes, outperforming a commercial hot-wire anemometer in signal consistency over three months of field deployment, though cycle times lengthened from 64.9 to 196 seconds as the FEP and copper components degraded.

Despite these successes, the review is candid about the obstacles standing between laboratory prototypes and industrial reality. TENGs still suffer from relatively low power density, and their pulsed alternating output demands sophisticated rectification, storage, and regulation circuits to deliver stable direct-current power. Conventional polymers such as PTFE, PDMS, and Kapton generate strong triboelectric signals but wear down, degrade chemically, and lose charge under high pressure, temperature swings, oil contamination, and corrosive conditions. Humidity and thermal activity promote charge trapping and dissipation, and most durability studies have been confined to controlled laboratory settings rather than the harsh environments where these devices must ultimately survive. The authors call for scalable, low-cost fabrication routes such as soft lithography, laser ablation, roll-to-roll printing, and spray coating to produce industrial-grade devices that combine high output with mechanical robustness, alongside standardized evaluation benchmarks for performance, durability, and environmental resistance.

The path forward, the researchers argue, lies in hybridization and smarter materials. Combining TENGs with piezoelectric, electromagnetic, or photovoltaic harvesters could stabilize energy supply across dynamic industrial conditions, while biodegradable polymers such as silk fibroin, chitosan, polylactic acid, and polycaprolactone, reinforced with carbon nanomaterials, MXenes, or liquid-metal droplets, could raise charge density without sacrificing sustainability. Self-healing elastomers with dynamic covalent or supramolecular bonds promise autonomous recovery from mechanical damage, extending device lifetimes. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are expected to handle adaptive signal processing, predictive energy optimization, and autonomous fault diagnosis, while additive manufacturing and 3D and 4D printing could embed TENGs directly into robotic joints, machinery surfaces, and structural components. If these interdisciplinary threads converge, the authors conclude, triboelectric nanogenerators could become the self-sustaining nervous system of Industry 4.0, sensing, powering, and protecting the factories of the future without drawing a single external watt.

Subject of Research: Triboelectric nanogenerators for self-powered smart industrial sensing applications

Article Title: Triboelectric nanogenerators for smart industrial sensing applications

Article References: Bhosale, P. S., Panda, S., Ramu, D., Hajra, S., Kaja, K. R., Belal, M., Kim, E., & Kim, H. J. (2025). Triboelectric nanogenerators for smart industrial sensing applications. Advances in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 1(1), Article 40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44405-025-00040-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44405-025-00040-x

Keywords: triboelectric nanogenerator, self-powered sensors, smart factory, energy harvesting, industrial IoT, vibration monitoring, machine fault detection, air filtration, power management, mining safety, Industry 4.0, nanogenerators