Electricity Generation from Capillary-Driven Ionic Solution Flow in a Three-Dimensional Graphene Membrane.

Harvesting energy from the ambient environment provides great promise in the applications of micro/nano devices and self-powered systems. Herein, we report a novel energy scavenging method that ionic solution infiltrating into a three-dimensional graphene (3DG) membrane can spontaneously generate electricity under ambient conditions. A constructed 3DG nanogenerator (3DGNG) with an effective size of 0.5×2 cm can produce a continuous voltage of ~0.28 V and a remarkable output current of ~62 μA. The voltage is higher than those generated from the interaction between water and carbon nanomaterials in previous researches typically in the range of microvolts to millivolts. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential application of the 3DGNG by illuminating a liquid crystal display (LCD) directly with ten 3DGNGs in-series. These results present a novel avenue for energy harvesting and show bright potential applications in small devices and self-powered systems.