Grounding strategy to promote the surface charge equilibrium and output performance of triboelectric nanogenerator

Abstract

As the driving force for the flow of electrons in the external circuit, the quantity of triboelectric charges in the friction layers is critical important, more triboelectric charges will bring about the larger output power of a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). In this work, a grounding strategy is proposed and developed to further increase the triboelectric charge density of the friction layer and the output of TENG, which can break through the limitations of increasing the output of TENG by merely enhancing material’s property itself. By designing the external circuit and utilizing an additional ground electrode, the electrons in the electron donor layer can be replenished timely, which contributes to a 2 times improvement in output current and 10 times improvement in output power. Additionally, the grounding strategy is used to improve the performance of sound wave-driven TENG (STNG). We found that the improvement effect of the grounding strategy on STNG’s (GS-enhanced STNG) output increases with the increasing of sound frequency, and the output power of this GS-enhanced STNG can be increased by 200 times.