Ultrastable and High-Performance Silk Energy Harvesting Textiles

Energy harvesting textiles (EHTs) have attracted much attention in wearable electronics and the internet-of-things for real-time mechanical energy harvesting associated with human activities. However, to satisfy practical application requirements, especially the demand for long-term use, it is challenging to construct an energy harvesting textile with elegant trade-off between mechanical and triboelectric performance. In this study, an energy harvesting textile was constructed using natural silk inspired hierarchical structural designs combined with rational material screening; this design strategy provides multiscale opportunities to optimize the mechanical and triboelectric performance of the final textile system. The resulting EHTs with traditional advantages of textiles showed good mechanical properties (tensile strength of 237 +/- 13 MPa and toughness of 4.5 +/- 0.4 MJ m(-3) for single yarns), high power output (3.5 mW m(-2)), and excellent structural stability (99% conductivity maintained after 2.3 million multi-type cyclic deformations without severe change in appearance), exhibiting broad application prospects in integrated intelligent clothing, energy harvesting, and human-interactive interfaces.