Regulating the electrical performance of contact-separation mode triboelectric nanogenerators based on double-sided groove textures

Abstract

The contact-separation mode triboelectric nanogenerators (CS-TENGs) is a kind of micro/nano electromechanical power system based on the contact electrification and electrostatic induction. With the expansion of application field of the CS-TENG, regulating the electrical performance becomes essential. In this paper, simple and effective methods for the CS-TENG output regulation based on the double-sided groove textures are proposed. To do this, groove textures on both Cu contact electrode and PDMS dielectric layer are fabricated, and influences and mechanisms of the alignment angle (the angle between the direction of groove textures on the Cu electrode and that on the PDMS dielectric layer), matching condition (textures sidewall contact and non-contact) and applied pressure on the CS-TENG output are explored through output tests, contact and electrostatic simulations. It is shown that altering the alignment angle, matching condition and applied pressure of groove texture on the Cu contact electrode and PDMS dielectric layer, could simply regulate the output of CS-TENG, where changing the alignment angle is the most effective. Under low and high applied pressures, the variations of the output voltage with alignment angle from 0˚–90˚ reach to 343.8% and 297.2%, respectively, and CS-TENG at 0˚ angle outputs the maximum voltage under both pressures, while the minimum voltages under the two pressures are exhibited from different angles. The change of contact area induced by the longitudinal deformation and transverse expansion of the groove textures is the main reason for the output regulations.