A self-powered bridge health monitoring system driven by elastic origami triboelectric nanogenerator

Bridge health monitoring system can play a role in bridge safety early warning, fatigue diagnosis, and life prediction. However, traditional bridge health monitoring system relies on manpower or battery power supply, which challenges the real-time effectiveness of health monitoring sensors. Herein, we proposed a self-powered bridge health monitoring system based on the elastic origami structure triboelectric nanogenerator (EO-TENG) array. In detail, the self-powered bridge health monitoring system contains the self-powered bridge health data acquisition/processing modular and the NB-IoTs communication modular. The EO-TENG follows an elastic origami structure design and can convert the low-frequency impact vibration energy into multiple frequency current output. With the integrated PMC, the EO-TENG array can provide the stable direct current (DC) voltage on the external load. Furthermore, the EO-TENG array with power management circuit (PMC) and energy storage device can drive the data processing modular to obtain and process vibration signals from piezoelectric patch. The NB-IoTs communication modular can send the vibration information to the terminal. Our design can provide a new system framework for TENG device in the bridge monitoring field. This design will promote the application of TENGs in the bridge monitoring field.