Surface Potential Tuned Single Active Material Comprised Triboelectric Nanogenerator for a High Performance Voice Recognition Sensor

To fabricate a high-performance and ultrasensitive triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), choice of a combination of different materials of triboelectric series is one of the prime challenging tasks. An effective way to fabricate a TENG with a single material (abbreviated as S-TENG) is proposed, comprising electrospun nylon nanofibers. The surface potential of the nanofibers are tuned by changing the voltage polarity in the electrospinning setup, employed between the needle and collector. The difference in surface potential leads to a different work function that is the key to design S-TENG with a single material only. Further, S-TENG is demonstrated as an ultrahigh sensitive acoustic sensor with mechanoacoustic sensitivity of ≈27 500 mV Pa-1 . Due to high sensitivity in the low-to-middle decibel (60-70 dB) sounds, S-TENG is highly capable in recognizing different voice signals depending on the condition of the vocal cord. This effective voice recognition ability indicates that it has high potential to open an alternative pathway for medical professionals to detect several diseases such as neurological voice disorder, muscle tension dysphonia, vocal cord paralysis, and speech delay/disorder related to laryngeal complications.