Flexible Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG) Based On Composite Materials By Fabrication And Characterization

Triboelectric nanogenerator(TENG)is an environmental-friendly and efficient energy harvesting technology,which has been widely used in self-power sensors since it was proposed in 2012.And the basic structured TENG has been well developed.Therefore,improving the output performance of TENG by designing its structure and selecting the materials is becoming a hot spot of research.In this project,the influence of various friction layer's material and nanostructures on the output performance of TENG were investigated,the main work is drawn as follows.First,five groups of contact-separation TENG(ITO/Kapton,ITO/PET,ITO/PDMS,Kapton/PET,and Kapton/PDMS)were fabricated and the open-circuit voltages were tested,respectively.It was found that the open circuit voltage of ITO/PDMS TENG can reach 13.76V/cm2 and show a remarkable performance.Besides,the rectifier bridge was used to convert the AC signal of TENG into an easily stored DC signal.Secondly,based on the theoretical model of TENG,the relationship between frequency and short-circuit current and charge density were studied by using Origin.Also,the output power of TENG under different frequencies were measured.The results demonstrated that when the frequency is 4Hz,the TENG has the maximum output power which is 23?W,and the best matching resistance is 106?.Furthermore,ZnO nanostructures were fabricated on the zinc seed layer substrate by hydrothermal method,and the influence of zinc oxide nanostructures with different morphologies as the friction layer material on the output performance of the TENG was investigated.The results show that the output voltage of TENG based on nanowires is two times than nanoflowers.Besides,the TENG based on Co and Ce doped ZnO nanostructures were fabricated,respectively,then its output performance was characterized.It was found that the TENG based on Ce-ZnO nanowires has the best performance which output voltage can reach 23V/cm2.Finally,the relationship between the separation distance of the fr-iction layer and the electric potential distribution of the basic structured TENG was studied,and then compared to the electric potential of nanowires structured TENG in COMSOL.The simulation results indicate that the electric potential of the TENG with nanowires structure is significantly higher than TENG without nanowires structure when the separation distance of friction layer is the same.