Ocean waves can do more than move a buoy: with triboelectric nanogenerators, their motion can become electrical power, wave measurements, and even underwater communication signals. Resource consumption and environmental pollution make it imperative to reduce carbon emissions, achieve carbon neutrality, and find pollution-free sources of renewable energy.

Solar energy, wind energy, and blue energy are the main clean energy sources currently being explored. Because oceans are widely distributed, developing and applying ocean energy has become a vital approach to solving increasingly serious energy problems.

A triboelectric nanogenerator, or TENG, was invented by Z. L. Wang in 2012, based on coupling contact electrification and electrostatic induction. When an ocean wave pushes the device, cyclical contact-separation or sliding motion occurs, and that motion generates electrical output.

The working mechanism depends on the different attraction to electrons of the materials used. When the materials are close, an electric charge is induced on the surface, generating a potential difference; when they separate, electrons flow back through the external circuit to balance it.

The paper introduces applications of TENG for energy harvesting and self-powered sensing in the ocean. It first summarizes blue-energy harvesting, concentrating on the energy-harvesting characteristics of TENG with different working modes.

It then generalizes the application field and advantages of TENG, before discussing challenges and feasible plans in marine science. Ocean energy includes wave energy, ocean current energy, tidal energy, and ocean thermal energy. For ocean current energy, a flexible underwater flag-like TENG system uses a contact-separation mode and consists of two conductive ink-coated PET membranes and a waterproof PTFE membrane.

A cylinder induces a vortex street, enhancing device vibration and significantly improving electrical output at lower flow velocities. Because ocean energy is irregular, a rolling-structured, freestanding triboelectric-layer-based nanogenerator improves TENG output under random wave motions from all directions.

Figure one connects TENG’s operating principle to its ocean applications: panel A shows repeated contact and separation generating electrical output, while panel B compares TENG with solar cells and electromagnetic generators across efficiency, power density, economy, scale, low-frequency waves, durability, and environmental adaptability.

Panel C shows an OSS-TENG converting wave fluctuations into an ocean-wave spectrum and parameters such as velocity, length, height, steepness, period, and frequency. Panel D extends this idea to self-powered navigation, where an HW-NG network supports route modification around reef areas.

A self-powered, high-performance triboelectric ocean-wave spectrum sensor, called TOSS, was fabricated with a tubular TENG and hollow ball buoy. TOSS has an ultrahigh sensitivity of two thousand five hundred thirty millivolts per millimeter and a tiny monitoring error of zero point one percent.

From its electrical signals, TOSS can recognize six basic ocean-wave parameters, along with wave-speed spectrum and mechanical-energy spectrum. Its predominant advantage is active ocean-wave sensing without any additional power source, supplying data support for intelligent marine monitoring.

A TENG can generate an underwater electric field, allowing the corresponding time-varying current to be measured at a distance. The underwater electric signal has strong anti-interference ability, and text and image signals can still be transmitted at sixteen bits per second after a one-hundred-meter-long spiral water pipe, without waveform distortion.

These results demonstrate the potential of TENG for marine information gathering and sensing through the principle and process of Maxwell displacement currents in underwater communication. Because environmental energy is random, TENG output is irregular and has high impedance and pulsed output characteristics.

Efficient and stable energy management is essential for self-powered systems. Power converters designed for impedance matching achieved sixty percent energy-storage efficiency. A rational charging cycle allows a theoretical increase of fifty percent in maximum energy-storage efficiency.

For safe navigation in bad weather, a hybrid wave-energy-harvesting nanogenerator, or HW-NG, was proposed as a power source for long-distance wireless transmission. The HW-NG is assembled with an electromagnetic generator integrated by a pendulum structure.

HW-NGs established communication nodes one point five kilometers away in the sea, while a wireless forewarning network composed of hundreds of HW-NGs enabled real-time forewarning through automatic switching modules. Large-scale array installation effectively ameliorated navigation safety.

A fur-brush TENG combines natural animal furs with TENG in a free-standing mode. Because wear is extremely low, device performance was reduced by only five point six percent after three hundred thousand continuous operation cycles, while output current increased by thirty percent in ambient conditions.

The fur-brush TENG maintained high output performance as relative humidity increased up to ninety percent. The experimental result shows a structure that reduces wear while maintaining high performance and can be applied in a high-humidity marine environment for a long time.

TENG has been widely applied in contemporary marine science, but the complexity of ocean conditions still creates many challenges. Although structural optimization has greatly improved energy-harvesting efficiency, it is difficult to form a unified standard across many TENG structures.

The proposed direction is to optimize and classify TENG structures and use modular design to reduce costs, while comparing operating modes, advantages, and application areas. Although TENG can harvest low-frequency, low-amplitude, and omnidirectional wave energy, energy-harvesting efficiency is limited in severe weather conditions; combining other generators allows application in different ocean conditions.

Because of high sensitivity and low price, TENG can serve as a self-powered sensor for large-scale marine information sensing. TENG can provide sensing signals for marine meteorological monitoring, safety monitoring, and signal communication, but it is easily affected by environmental factors.

A large-scale TENG sensor network can increase the number of samples, reduce sensor-system error, and determine more accurate information. Multidimensional data analysis and embedded software could collect and process sensing information in an integrated way, reducing the impact of measurement errors on real data.

The central takeaway is that TENGs offer a route to self-powered marine monitoring, but practical systems still need better standardization, energy management, and performance in severe weather.