Executive Summary : | Energy is vital for the development of mankind and the demand for it is increasing day by day. The average increase in energy consumption between 2009 and 2018 is about 1.6%. In the current scenario, renewable energy contributes only a small part compared to the total energy demand. The main renewable energy resources for energy production are solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydropower, and the ocean, which help to reduce the energy crisis and environmental pollution. Wind energy is an abundant renewable resource for energy harvesting and has huge potential for generating electricity. Conventional electro-magnetic generator (EMG) windmills are of large sizes with high costs of installation and maintenance. These wind mills only harvest energy from high-speed wind. So conventional windmills can’t be considered as an effective solution to the energy crisis faced by urban areas. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) can overcome these disadvantages of windmills as they can be made at low cost and harvest wind energy even at low speeds. Researchers have proposed harvesting wind energy by using TENGs. However, there is significant wear loss and less power generation in the previously proposed mechanisms. It is necessary to identify a new hybrid working mechanism combined with EMG that minimises wear loss, and also a new triboelectric material pair for generating more electrical output by using bio-composite materials which can improve the electron-withdrawing and electron-donating ability of tribo-electric materials. Since most of the renewable energy forms are intermittent or regionally limited, there is a pressing need to develop advanced energy storage systems like super-capacitors for efficient storage. The efficiency of storage devices depends on the structure and properties of component materials. Super-capacitors are able to fill the gap between conventional capacitors and batteries by providing high power performance. They have a higher energy density than conventional capacitors and a higher power density than batteries. This project aims to improve the power generation from wind energy by fabricating a mechanism using hybrid tribo-electric nanogenerators which have bio-composite triboelectric layers and a super-capacitor to store the generated electricity. |