RESEARCH ARTICLE Highly porous and thermally stable tribopositive hybrid bimetallic cryogel to boost up the performance of triboelectric nanogenerators Abdul Haleem 1 | Zeeshan Haider 2 | Rafi u Shan Ahmad 2 | Uzabakiriho Pierre Claver 2 | Afzal Shah 3 | Gang Zhao 2 | Wei-Dong He 1 1 CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China 2 Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China 3 Department of Chemistry, College of Science, University of Bahrain, Bahrain Correspondence Gang Zhao, Department of Electronic Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China. Email: zhaog@ustc.edu.cn Wei-Dong He, CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China. Email: wdhe@ustc.edu.cn Funding information National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 20934005, 21274136 Summary There have been tremendous efforts made to investigate various materials to enhance the electrical performance of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) but there is still demand for some techniques to further enhance the performance of tribomaterials. Therefore, we fabricated a bimetallic hybrid cryogel via cheap and facile UV-radiation as well as in situ reduction method. Fabricated TENG device made up of porous hybrid bimetallic cryogel film containing silver and gold nanoparticles as tribopositive material and poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS) as a tribonegative layer with dimension of 1 × 2 cm 2 has the ability to produced output voltage of 262.14 V with current density of 27.52 mA/m 2 and 7.44 W/m 2 peak power density, which was sufficient to light up more than 120 white light emitting-diodes (LEDs). Porous and rough structure, interaction of nanoparticles was the reason behind the performance enhancement of tribopositive material. Thus, this study introduces a very stable and easily synthesized bimetallic hybrid cryogel as a tribopositive material to enhance the performance of tribomaterials to design high performance TENG devices. KEYWORDS bimetallic, capacitor, cryogels, cryo-polymerization triboelectric, nanogenerator, UV-radiation 1 | INTRODUCTION With the speedy growth of modern society and the global economy along with limited accessibility of fossil fuel and increasing environmental pollution, the demand for effective and clean energy is continuously increasing for the various applications of small electronic devices. 1-5 Due to the continuous advancement of portable electronics, widely distributed of wireless sensors nodes, powering of these electronic devices required in such applications through batteries which have limited life- time and a cable is problematic and tedious. 6,7 To cater this problem, harvesting of mechanical energy from the environment has developed with extensive interest and essential influence. 8-13 To harvest mechanical energy, the triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) device has dis- played many advantages, that is, low cost, easy device fabrication, lightweight, capable of generating energy from the ambient environment, 14,15 high output voltage, 16 flexible material choice, 17,18 and ability to Abdul Haleem and Zeeshan Haider contributed equally to this study. Received: 28 December 2019 Revised: 20 April 2020 Accepted: 21 April 2020 DOI: 10.1002/er.5530 Int J Energy Res. 2020;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/er © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1