Influence of Thickness and Relative Permittivity of Triboelectric Materials on CS-TENG Performance: A Simulation Study

Recently, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have emerged as promising technology to generate electricity from wasted mechanical energies based on charge transfer between two suitably selected dielectric surfaces. Simulation studies play a key role in pre-fabrication processes to understand and optimize the TENGs performance. In this work, contact-separation TENG (CS-TENG) is reported based on finite element modeling simulation. The influence of the thickness and relative permittivity of triboelectric materials on the CS-TENG performance under open-circuit (OC) and short-circuit (SC) conditions was investigated. It was found that under the OC condition, the output voltage $$V_{OC}$$ shows unsignificant change (slight reduction) upon increasing the thickness of tribo-materials from 100 to 500 µm and the relative permittivity of negative tribo-material from 2.7 to 7.5. On the other hand, under the SC condition, the air gap voltage ( $$V_{gap,SC}$$ ) was significantly affected (remarkably decreased) by increasing the thickness of tribo-materials 100 to 500 µm and the relative permittivity of negative tribo-material from 2.7 to 7.5. In addition, the influence of the thickness and relative permittivity on the electric field along with the distribution of electric potential and electric field within the CS-TENG structure was explored to bring an in-depth understanding of the fundamental physics of the TENGs.