Metal-Organic Framework Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator for a Self-Powered Methanol Sensor with High Sensitivity and Selectivity

Triboelectric nanogenerators have shown great potentialin thearea of self-powered gas sensors in the past decade. In this paper,we developed a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) based on spiky structuredZIF-8@ZnO, which can harvest energy with high efficiency and act asa self-powered methanol sensor. The open-circuit voltage and short-circuitcurrent generated by a ZIF-8@ZnO-based TENG is 58 V and 10 & mu;A,achieving 2.4 times and 3.3 times enhancement compared to ZnO-basedTENGs. The TENG can charge capacitors fast and light up at least 40LEDs. ZIF-8@ZnO-based TENGs show good sensitivity and selectivityto methanol gas at room temperature due to the porous structure providedby ZIF-8 and the heterostructure of ZIF-8@ZnO. The response of ZIF-8@ZnO-basedTENG to methanol reaches 30.35% at 100 ppm with excellent response(& SIM;5.9 s) and recovery time (& SIM;2.2 s). This work demonstratesthe application of MOF-modified metal oxide semiconductors based ona self-powered gas sensor and proposes a promising solution to enhancethe output performance and sensing properties of TENGs based on metaloxide semiconductors.