Design and fabrication of a spiral electrode triboelectric nanogenerator and application as zero power dynamic sensor

Abstract

Harvesting energy from environmental motions is an efficient method to prepare permanent power supplies for intelligent wireless systems. In this paper, a single spiral electrode triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is fabricated and investigated for energy harvesting from multi-directional sliding motions. The device is intended to be also used as a self-powered dynamic velocity sensor. In the first step, four samples are fabricated and characterized by applying 2 Hz sliding motions. The results show an increase in the output power from 1.53 to 20.72 nW, for a device with 4 to 20 turns. To compare the results, the effect of increasing the output power using a parallel array is also studied. In the next step, applications of the device as velocity and position sensors are investigated. A linear dependence between the input and output of the sensor is noticed for the device with 8, and 16 spiral turns. Finally, a circuit modeling for the device is presented, and a trend is suggested for the virtual capacitive behavior of the single electrode TENG.

Keywords

• energy harvesting
• triboelectric
• sliding motions
• spiral electrode
• dynamic zero-power sensor