Enhancing The Performance Of Triboelectric Generator Through Charge Injection And Its Application On Self-powered Anticorrosion

Self-powered system is a functional system which could convert weak mechanical energy in the environment into electric energy for powering itself to achieve some special function. Recently, self-powered systems developed rapidly and have exhibited wide application prospect in many fields such as motion detecting, environmental monitoring, biological and medical. All of these developments could be owed to the appearance of the triboelectric nanogenerator(TENG) with high performance. So, the performance of TENG must be further enhanced if we want to apply the self-powered systems to more fields. In this thesis, we introduced a new method which injects charges directly into the space between the surface of the friction layers and the electrodes to further enhance the TENG’s performance. This method can be widely used in most of the TENGs reported before. Also, we developed a self-powered anticorrosion system based on the TENG with enhanced performance, exhibiting a good application prospect in engineering field. The detailed works are as follows.We fabricated a TENG based on the long Polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS) micro-rod array. Its output open-circuit voltage reached 449 V and its output short-circuit current reached 22.6 ?A, corresponding to charge density of 62 ?C/m2. Then, we further enhanced the TENG’s performance by injecting negative charge into the PDMS micro-rods array through ordinary charge injection method. The short-circuit current reached 35.1 ?A, increased by 55.3%,while the charge density reached 108 ?C/m2, increased by 74.2%.Furthermore, we improved the charge injection method to make it be able to be used in most of the TENG reported before and more convenient to inject the charge into friction layers. Then we made TENG based on PA6/PVDF film to confirm that this improved method is effective. Nanostructures fabricated through a simple method and the improved charge injection method were used to greatly enhance the performance of TENG. The charge density was increased by 48% owing to the nanostructures and further increased by 53% owing to the prior-charge injection process. The output open-circuit voltage reached 1008 V, the short-circuit current reached 51.4 ?A and the charge density reached 121 μC/m2.At last, we demonstrated a self-powered anticorrosion system based on the TENGs with enhanced performance mentioned before. Iron sheets were protected from rusting in simulated seawater successfully. This self-powered anticorrosion system exhibits a good prospect to protect materials from rusting with low energy cost and it is the first approach to use the TENG in engineering field.