All elastomeric pillars-based triboelectric vibration sensor for self-powered broad range machinery condition monitoring

Industrial vibration monitoring is crucial for anticipating equipment failures and ensuring smooth machinery operations. To address this need, we propose a Siloxene-Ecoflex elastomeric macro-pillared self-powered triboelectric vibration sensor (SP-TVS) that offers exceptional detection capabilities, with an ultra-wide frequency range (0.01–15 kHz) and acceleration range (0.1–7.0 g). The SP-TVS combines a facile fabricated elastomeric macro-pillar of nanocomposite paired with a flexible thin film of styrene-ethylene-butylene-styrene (SEBS) to realize the TVS. The SP-TVS exhibits high-frequency response (up to 15 kHz) due to the random high elastic vibration behavior of the macro-pillars and demonstrates excellent acceleration sensitivity of 2.033 V/g (0.1–0.5 g), 1.455 V/g (0.5–2.0 g), and 1.116 V/g (2.0–7.0 g) at r2 = 0.99 in low, medium, and high acceleration ranges and enables subtle vibration amplitude detections. Finally, the SP-TVS has been successfully deployed on various machineries, employing a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithm to process sensor data, performs self-powered machinery identification, vibration inspection, and fault monitoring, showcasing its significant potential for a wide range of industrial monitoring applications. [Display omitted] •Triboelectric vibration sensor is designed and fabricated using all elastomeric Siloxene-Ecoflex pillars and SEBS film.•Inherent elasticity and random vibration of pillars allows a broad range of vibration frequency detection (0.1–15 k Hz).•Frequency tunability can be obtained in ultra-wide range vibration (0.1–7 g) by varying the pillar dimensions.•The vibration features of various machineries can be acquired and processed for long-term condition monitoring.•A highly sophisticated AI model allows machinery identification, vibration inspection and fault monitoring in real time.