Abstract

Over the decades, the energy shortage, environmental degradation, and greenhouse effect have mandated the necessity to discover and use alternative clean and sustainable energy sources, such as solar thermal energy, biomechanical energy, and wind energy, to replace the traditional fossil fuels, as they are sustainable and environmentally friendly. In recent decades, there has been a surge in the research and development efforts dedicated to power generation that transforms the waste resources that exist in the environment, such as mechanical vibration, light illumination, thermal heat, wind flow, radiations, and flow of water, into electricity for lowpower gadgets.Much emphasis has been placed on ambient sources of energy that are appropriate for power generation, such as sunlight, radio waves, sound energy, thermal gradients, and kinetic mechanical energy. Kinetic and magnetic energy are the most abundant and versatile of these sources, manifesting themselves in our surroundings as mechanical movements and stray magnetic fields. This chapter focuses on the various fabrication processes used to enhance the piezoelectric and energy harvesting performance of flexible polymer nanogenerators. It gives a brief overview of the various fillers used in polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) to improve the performance of nanogenerators and discusses the mechanisms for understanding energy generation. Finally, we summarize the recent advances in this field and describe the future opportunities for improving the energy harvester performance.