Abstract
This paper presents a novel aerogel-based Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) which shows a superior performance for energy harvesting and sensing applications. Polyimide-based aerogel film with varying open-cell content level is developed to be used as the main contact material for the TENG. The fabricated aerogel film is fully characterized to reveal the chemical and mechanical properties of the developed material. It is shown the use of Polyimide aerogel film remarkably enhances the performance of the TENG compared to a TENG with fully dense Polyimide layer with no porosity. This enhancement is due to the increase on the effective surface area, charge generation inside the open-cells of the aerogel, and increase on the relative capacitance of the TENG device. The effect of varying porosity from zero to 70% of open-cell content reveals that the aerogel film with 50% shows the highest performance where the peak open-circuit voltage of 40V and peak short-circuit current of 5 μA are obtained. These values are higher than those of the TENG with simple Polyimide layer with an order of magnitude. Finally, the performance of proposed TENG under resistive loads and capacitors are tested. Thus, this work presents an effective method for high performance TENG.
Highlights
Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) has been introduced as a novel and efficient method for converting mechanical energy into electricity[5]
The introduced polyimide aerogel films are mainly involved in mechanical compression according to the targeted TENG design and configuration
Polyimide-based aerogel film was employed to enhance the performance of triboelectric nanogenerators
Summary
Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) has been introduced as a novel and efficient method for converting mechanical energy into electricity[5]. Foam-shaped materials with nano/micro-porous spongy configurations were presented as effective materials which can be used as the contact layers of the TENG device[35,36,37]. Such spongy structures were mostly fabricated by mixing PDMS with micro/nano particles such as NaCl microparticles and ZnO nanoparticles to be embedded first and removed from the PDMS structure[35,38]. A TENG using PDMS composite film with graphite particles reached the output 2.6-fold of the pure PDMS film TENG42
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