A Strategy to Reduce Air Breakdown Effect and Boost Output Energy for Contact-Separation Mode Triboelectric Nanogenerator

Abstract

Air breakdown effect, which restricts the increase of the surface charge density, is the major limitation for further improving the output performance of triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). To solve this problem, a universal strategy which only requires adding an appropriate external capacitor to TENG is proposed in this work. By connecting a 68 pF external capacitor with a $2\times 2\ \text{cm}^{2}$ contact-separation (CS) mode TENG in parallel, the output energy per cycle can be increased to 2.5 times of that without an external capacitor. This research provides a novel and simple way to suppress the air breakdown effect and improve the output performance of CS-TENG.