High performance of multi-layered triboelectric nanogenerators for mechanical energy harvesting

Abstract

Triboelectric nanogenerators have been invented recently as a power supply source for small electronics and exhibit a high potential to solve the world energy crisis. Herein, triboelectric nanogenerators with different electrodes and a multi-layered dielectric structure based on vertical contact separation mode were fabricated for energy harvesting. The triboelectric nanogenerator Model 4 with aluminum electrodes in both conductive layers have four times higher output voltage and reaches the highest voltage in a much shorter time than the other triboelectric nanogenerator models. Nine triboelectric nanogenerators with a layer of polypropylene non-woven fabric and another layer of Kapton film were fabricated to investigate the impact of layered structure on the triboelectric nanogenerator performance. The 3 PP-2K triboelectric nanogenerator has a 191 V of output voltage, 6 V of charge capacity, and 8.75 W/m2 of power generation performance, which are higher than those of other triboelectric nanogenerators. This study shows that the output performance depends on both electrode and different layers of dielectric materials and also proposes an effective approach to designing high-performance mechanical energy conversion devices for practical applications in the field of self-operating wearable systems.