Self-Powered Triboelectric Nanogenerators in Intelligent Food Packaging: Recent Advances and Applications.

As demands for food quality, safety, traceability, and sustainability increase, traditional packaging systems face challenges in power supply, information acquisition, and dynamic quality management. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), integrating energy harvesting and signal transduction in a self-powered platform, offer a promising approach for intelligent food packaging. This review summarizes recent advances in TENG-based intelligent food packaging, focusing on working mechanisms, material selection, structural optimization, and applications. Recent advances in charge regulation, interface engineering, and device architecture are discussed in relation to output performance, environmental robustness, and multimodal sensing. Representative applications integrating TENGs with pressure, humidity, vibration, and gas sensors for self-powered monitoring during food transportation, storage, and distribution are summarized. The potential of integrating TENGs with machine learning for data analysis, quality prediction, and intelligent decision-making is also discussed. Current challenges, including limited output, environmental adaptability, mechanical durability, and scalability, are analyzed, and future research directions are proposed. This review provides guidance for the development and industrialization of TENG-based intelligent food packaging and highlights opportunities for future innovation.