Synchronous Switching Strategy to Enhance the Real-Time Powering and Charging Performance of Triboelectric Nanogenerator.

Abstract

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are of great significance as sustainable power sources that harvest energy from the human body and environment. Nevertheless, due to TENG's impedance-dependent output voltage characteristics, in traditional strategy (TS), real-timely powering a sensor with TENG has a poor sensing on/off ratio (or response), and directly charging a capacitor with TENG shows a low charging efficiency. This degraded real-time powering and charging performance of TENG compared to a commercial constant voltage source is a huge challenge of the TENG field for a long time. This work proposes a synchronous switching strategy (SSS) for TENG to real-timely power sensors or charge capacitors without degrading its performance. Compared with TS, this new strategy enables sensors to have 5-7 times sensing on/off ratio enhancement when using TENG as a power source, reaching the powering ability of a commercial constant voltage source, it makes the powering performance of TENG stable under different driving frequency, improving the powering robustness of TENG. In addition, compared with TS, SSS can also enhance the charging efficiency of TENG in every charging cycle by up to 2.4 times when charging capacitors. This work contributes to real-timely powering or charging the distributed, mobile and wireless electronics using TENG.