Breakthroughs and challenges in cylindrical TENGs toward high-efficiency harvesting high-entropy energy

High-entropy energy is a class of massive and ubiquitous energy in the environment, that is not yet to be fully exploited due to the low frequency, poor-quality and randomness. Meanwhile, the serious technical difficulties for existing candidate energy conversion technologies must be faced, such as low efficiency, complicated structure and high cost. In this context, triboelectric nanogenerator offers a new chance that has potential of solving the challenges, in which the cylindrical triboelectric nanogenerators (C-TENGs) possess remarkable advantages in this field due to diverse structure and characteristics. This paper gives the data summarization, discussion and analysis of C-TENGs with the structure design, triboelectric materials, electrical output and essential technical features. In addition, the existing and potential applications of C-TENGs are distinguished according to the adaptation of morphology, structure and generalization performance. Furthermore, some potential coping strategies to challenges to be addressed towards the large-scale application and commercialization are discussed.