Iron-sheet-based semi-natural triboelectric nanogenerator for corrosion monitoring

Metal corrosion is a common phenomenon in industrial production and always causes a lot of damage to property and casualties. The development of innovative monitoring strategies that are able to simultaneosly detect the formation and monitor the development of rust stablely and selectively is important for extend the asset lifespan in any process industry that intensivley uses volatile materials, such as oil and gas or petrochemical products. In this paper, a semi-natural triboelectric nanogenerator(SN-TENG)was designed for detecting metal corrosion. NaCl solution that was dripped onto the SN-TENG triggerred single electrode triboelectric processes that was originated from the iron electrode, which resulted in a short circuit current of about 2.45 mu A and an open circuit voltage of 10.50 V, respectively. Moreover, the output of the SN-TENG is proportional to the corrosion state of rusty iron electrode. The longer the corrosion time, the higher the output of SN-TENG. It is worthy noting that the output of the SN-TENG no longer increases when the corrosion time of rusty iron is above 80 h, which means that the SN-TENG can not only detect the metal corrosion state in time, but also provide corrosion protection for metal instruments.