Publications

Cartilage degradation is a hallmark of osteoarthritis. Restoring the natural bioelectric environment of osteoarthritic tissue could offer a promising treatment strategy through physical modulation. We report a microsized, biodegradable implantable patch that utilizes a piezoelectric effect-enhanced triboelectric charge generator (PTEG) to promote cartilage regeneration and osteoarthritis healing. Featuring a triboelectric architecture with macroscopic pyramids and microscopic porosities, the PTEG patch produces a charge density of 242 μC m^-2 in vitro and 84 μC m^-2 in vivo, approximately 2 orders of magnitude higher than that of the state-of-the-art implantable charge generators. Additionally, the PTEG patch demonstrates excellent biocompatibility and tunable degradability. In vitro experiments show that the PTEG significantly promotes bone marrow stem cell migration, Ca²⁺ influx, and chondrogenic gene expression. In an osteoarthritis rat model, PTEG implantation was shown to reduce osteophyte formation and enhance cartilage regeneration significantly.

He-Wei granules (HWKL) combat cisplatin-induced nephrotoxicity and myelosuppression in rats by inhibiting oxidative stress, inflammatory cytokines and apoptosis

A newly-designed triboelectric nanogenerator is demonstrated which is composed of a grating-segmented freestanding triboelectric layer and two groups of interdigitated electrodes with the same periodicity. The sliding motion of the grating units across the electrode fingers can be converted into multiple alternating currents through the external load due to the contact electrification and electrostatic induction. Working in non-contact mode, the device shows excellent stability and the total conversion efficiency can reach up to 85% at low operation frequency.

Flowing water contains not only mechanical kinetic energy, but also the electrostatic energy owing to the triboelectric charges caused by its contact with surrounding media such as air. In this paper, a water wheel hybridized triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), composed of a water-TENG part and a disk-TENG part, has been developed for simultaneously harvesting the two types of energies from the tap water flowing from a household faucet. The wheel blades of the hybridized TENG are composed by superhydrophobic polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) thin films with nanostructures, which are used as water-TENG to harvest the electrostatic energy from the flowing water. In addition, the flowing water impacted on the wheel blades also causes the rotation motion of disk-TENG and can be used to harvest the mechanical kinetic energy. The short-circuit current of the water-TENG and the disk-TENG at a flowing water rate of 54 mL/s can reach 12.9 and 3.8 μA, respectively. The hybridized TENG is also demonstrated to harvest wind energy and acts as a self-powered sensor to detect the flowing water rate and wind speed. All these results show the potentials of the hybridized TENG for harvesting multiple types of energies from the environment.

The aim of this study was to investigate the potential relationship between acylation-stimulating protein (ASP), insulin resistance, lipometabolism, the intrauterine metabolic environment and fetal growth in well-controlled gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) women. A total of 55 well-controlled GDM women, 66 pregnant women with normal glucose tolerance (NGT) and their newborns, were included in this study. Fasting maternal and cord blood ASP, serum lipid profiles, glucose level, insulin level, HOMA-IR, in addition to neonatal anthropometry data, were measured. Maternal blood ASP in GDM is higher than that in NGT. In the GDM group, maternal blood ASP has a positive correlation with TG, FFA and HOMA-IR. Maternal and cord blood ASP levels of LGA fetuses correlate with elevated birth weight and SF4. Similarly, cord blood ASP levels of LGA fetuses also correlate with birth weight and SF4 in the NGT group. The maternal blood ASP level of GDM mothers is associated with lipometabolism, insulin resistance and LGA fetal growth. Nevertheless, the cord blood ASP level correlates with FFA of GDM mothers, LGA fetal growth of GDM and NGT mothers. ASP may be a biomarker for evaluating insulin resistance of GDM and LGA fetal growth.

We report here a simple and effective approach, named scalable sweeping-printing-method, for fabricating flexible high-output nanogenerator (HONG) that can effectively harvesting mechanical energy for driving a small commercial electronic component. The technique consists of two main steps. In the first step, the vertically aligned ZnO nanowires (NWs) are transferred to a receiving substrate to form horizontally aligned arrays. Then, parallel stripe type of electrodes are deposited to connect all of the NWs together. Using a single layer of HONG structure, an open-circuit voltage of up to 2.03 V and a peak output power density of approximately 11 mW/cm(3) have been achieved. The generated electric energy was effectively stored by utilizing capacitors, and it was successfully used to light up a commercial light-emitting diode (LED), which is a landmark progress toward building self-powered devices by harvesting energy from the environment. This research opens up the path for practical applications of nanowire-based piezoelectric nanogeneragtors for self-powered nanosystems.

Abstract An integrated self‐powered dynamic displacement monitoring system by utilizing a novel triboelectric accelerometer for structural health monitoring is proposed and implemented in this study, which can show the dynamic displacement and transmit the alarming signal by accurately sensing the vibration acceleration. The fabricated triboelectric accelerometer based on the noncontact freestanding triboelectric nanogenerator consists of an outer transparent sleeve tube and an inner cylindrical inertial mass that is suspended by a highly stretchable silicone fiber. One pair of copper film electrodes is deposited by physical vapor deposition on nylon film and adhered on the inner wall of the outer tube, while a fluorinated ethylene propylene film with nanowire structures is adhered on the surface of the inner cylindrical inertial mass. The experimental results show that proposed triboelectric accelerometer can accurately sense the vibration acceleration with a high sensitivity of 0.391 V s 2 m −1 . In particular, the developed accelerometer has superior performance within the low‐frequency range. One of the most striking features is that the commercial accelerometer using piezoelectric material is strongly dominated by high‐order harmonics, which can cause confusion in computer data analysis. In contrast, the triboelectric accelerometer is only dominated by the base resonance mode.

The seamless integration of emerging triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) technology with traditional wearable textile materials has given birth to the next-generation smart textiles, i.e., textile TENGs, which will play a vital role in the era of Internet of Things and artificial intelligences. However, low output power and inferior sensing ability have largely limited the development of textile TENGs. Among various approaches to improve the output and sensing performance, such as material modification, structural design, and environmental management, a 3D fabric structural scheme is a facile, efficient, controllable, and scalable strategy to increase the effective contact area for contact electrification of textile TENGs without cumbersome material processing and service area restrictions. Herein, the recent advances of the current reported textile TENGs with 3D fabric structures are comprehensively summarized and systematically analyzed in order to clarify their superiorities over 1D fiber and 2D fabric structures in terms of power output and pressure sensing. The forward-looking integration abilities of the 3D fabrics are also discussed at the end. It is believed that the overview and analysis of textile TENGs with distinctive 3D fabric structures will contribute to the development and realization of high-power output micro/nanowearable power sources and high-quality self-powered wearable sensors.

In spite of high piezoelectricity, only a few one-dimensional ferroelectric nano-materials with perovskite structure have been used for piezoelectric nanogenerator applications. In this paper, we report high output electrical signals, i.e. an open-circuit voltage of 3.2 V and a closed-circuit current of 67.5 nA (current density 9.3 nA cm−2) at 0.38% strain and 15.2% s−1 strain rate, using randomly aligned lead-free KNbO3 ferroelectric nanorods (∼1 μm length) with piezoelectric coefficient (d33 ∼ 55 pm V −1). A flexible piezoelectric nanogenerator is mainly composed of KNbO3–poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) composite sandwiched by Au/Cr-coated polymer substrates. We deposit a thin poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) layer between the KNbO3–PDMS composite and the Au/Cr electrode to completely prevent dielectric breakdown during electrical poling and to significantly reduce leakage current during excessive straining. The flexible KNbO3–PDMS composite device shows a nearly frequency-independent dielectric constant (∼3.2) and low dielectric loss (<0.006) for the frequency range of 102–105 Hz. These results imply that short and randomly aligned ferroelectric nanorods can be used for a flexible high output nanogenerator as well as high-k capacitor applications by performing electrical poling and further optimizing the device structure.

Large-area aligned Mo nanowires have been grown on stainless steel substrates by high-temperature chemical vapor deposition with the use of Mo metal. The detailed physical and chemical growth processes regarding the formation of the nanowires have been investigated using mass spectroscopy, thermogravimetry, and differential scanning calorimetry analysis, as well as structure analysis by electron microscopy. In reference to Gibbs energy calculation, our study reveals that the growth relies on the decomposition of MoO2 vapors through condensation of its vapor at high substrate temperatures. The aligned growth is a result of competing growth with the nanowires normal to the substrate surface reaching the final growth front. The field emission measurement and the vacuum luminescent tube study show that the Mo nanowires have potential application as electron emitters.

According to the characteristics of deep diversion tunnel of Jinping II Hydropower Station located in the high field stress condition, for its surrounding rock, i.e. marble, the conventional triaxial test and pre-peak unloading test are carried out.Then study on its mechanical characteristics through the comparative analysis.The results show that: The peak strength increases according to the initial confining pressure increases, and even if the stress path and initial confining pressure is different, but as long as the real-time confining pressure, the peak strength is equal.Further, the change rule of mechanics parameters is the same under different stress paths.These conclusions have revealed the difference of mechanical properties of marble under loading and unloading conditions and provided reliable theoretical reference for the numerical simulation about excavation, designing and stability analysis of deep diversion tunnel in West China.