Recently, the team of Professor Ming Zhou from the School of Chemistry of NENU makes new progress in life analysis and fully integrated bioelectronics. This research first proposed the flexible and wearable epidermal microfluidic ethanol/oxygen biofuel cell, which is a human exogenous substance, and could be used for sweat sampling and sweat power generation simultaneously on human skin after drinking alcohol. Titled “A Flexible and Wearable Epidermal Ethanol Biofuel Cell for On-body and Real-time Bioenergy Harvesting from Human Sweat”, the study is published in the internationally renowned journal Nano Energy, which specializes in the field of nano (Impact Factor: 16.602).
The flexible and wearable epidermal biofuel cell can be worn on the skin and generate electricity directly through human sweat. It is considered to be the most attractive and promising next-generation energy source for the collection of energy from the body by wearable electronic products. Previously reported epidermal biofuel cells only focused on the use of endogenous substances in human sweat (that is, glucose or lactic acid that the human body can produce) as biofuels for power generation. Taking into account the diversity of substances in the human body, some exogenous substances (substances that the human body cannot produce) will also outflow by the sweat in some cases. However, so far, people have neglected the utility of these exogenous substances in the collection of epidermal bioenergy. The team of Professor Zhou Ming first proposed the non-invasive, flexible and wearable epidermal ethanol biofuel cell, which expands the range of biofuels in human sweat from endogenous substances to exogenous substances, and thus brings great prospects for the wearable and real-time acquisition of bioenergy from sweat. This discovery may open up new ways and challenges for exploring the use of human sweat for bioenergy conversion.
In this paper, PhD student Sun Mimi is the first author, and Professor Ming Zhou and Associate Professor Bai Jing are the corresponding authors.
Attachment: link to the paper
(From News Center, translated by Wei Jia, revised by Liu Lixin)