Understanding and modeling of triboelectric-electret nanogenerator

Abstract

Recently, electrostatic kinetic energy harvesters regained strong attention through the development of new triboelectric generators for harvesting green and renewable energy. These devices use a triboelectric dielectric layer as electret for polarizing their capacitance and they behave similarly to electret generators. However, triboelectric-based electret nanogenerators (T-ENG) have specificities arising from the contact electrification phenomenon and leading to different performances. For better understanding T-ENG, we investigated their electrical modeling with lumped-elements and multiphysics simulation in light of last researches on electret generators. To take into account T-ENG specificities, we experimentally measured the amplitude of the triboelectric effect on perfluoroalkoxy alkane films. This approach allowed fully simulating T-ENG and the model was found in agreement with experimental results. Understanding and verifying the model is capital, but to go further toward the application of T-ENG, we reused two electret circuits to extract the T-ENG model parameters in view of facilitating their realistic modeling and practical development into application.