Design And Application Of Rotating Triboelectric Nanogenerator

The worldwide energy shortage and environmental pollution have aroused people's long-lasting attention to green energy and sustainable development.Acquiring mechanical energy from the environment is one of the options that can solve the energy shortage without additional pollution.The triboelectric nanogenerator(TENG)has been confirmed as an effective strategy for converting mechanical energy into electrical energy through contact electrification and electrostatic induction.However,the structure of the device and the characteristics of its own electrical output are still two major issues that limit its practical applications.To solve such difficulties,this paper proposes a non-contact,free-rotating triboelectric nanogenerator to collect the rotating mechanical energy in the external environment,and explores the rectifier circuit schemes and subsequent applications suitable for the triboelectric nanogenerator.The main contents of this paper are as follows:(1)A rotating triboelectric nanogenerator was designed.With fluorinated ethylene propylene(FEP)film and copper foil as the friction and electrode layer,seven kinds of TENG devices with different areas and different sector pairs were fabricated.The device consists of two parts:the rotational part and the stationary part.PCB technology is utilized to deposit copper foil on the stationary disc.And the rotational disc is without electrode deposition or wire lead and the device can continuously being operated in non-contact mode,which greatly demonstrates the flexibility and durability.Moreover,the working mechanism of the rotating triboelectric nanogenerator is further analyzed by studying four different working modes of TENG.(2)Build an electrical test system for electrical tests of the device,mainly for open circuit voltage V_OC,short circuit current I_SC,transferred charge Q_SC and load impedance capacity,and explore the factors that affect the electrical output of the rotating triboelectric nanogenerator.The results show that V_OC,I_SC,and Q_SC have an overall increasing trend along with raising the device area or reducing the distance between two disks;the sector angle(the number of sector pairs)and the rotating speed mainly affect the I_SC,I_SC increases as the speed raises and decreases with reduction of sector pairs.However,it has almost no effect on the V_OC and the Q_SC which is consistent with the theory.(3)By analyzing the equivalent model of the triboelectric nanogenerator with freestanding layer mode,the circuit model of the device is obtained.The device rectification simulation of three different rectifier circuits of half-wave,full-wave bridge,and Bennet's doubler are explored through the SPICE software.In the simulation,it is proved that the full-wave bridge rectifier circuit is currently the best rectification scheme of the rotary triboelectric nanogenerators,which is consistent with the experimental results.Furthermore,the effect of different energy storage capacitors on the output of Bennet's doubler circuit is also studied.(4)Based on the research of the device structure and rectification scheme,a rotary TENG with an outer diameter of 75 mm and a sector number of 8 pairs is selected to explore the application capabilities.Under the same conditions,the device can light up50 white LEDs connected in series at the same time.The electrical energy stored by the capacitor can drive small electronic devices such as temperature,humidity sensors and electronic calculators to work normally without any external power supply.The drive capability of the device as a power source can be further enhanced by constructing a large-scale environmental mechanical energy collection network.