Matching the Directions of Electric Fields from Triboelectric and Ferroelectric Charges in Nanogenerator Devices for Boosted Performance

Andris Šutka; Kaspars Mālnieks; Linards Lapčinskis; Martin Timusk; Kaspars Pudzs; Martins Rutkis

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2020.101011

Matching the Directions of Electric Fields from Triboelectric and Ferroelectric Charges in Nanogenerator Devices for Boosted Performance

iScience. 2020 Apr 24;23(4):101011. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101011. Epub 2020 Mar 29.

Authors

Andris Šutka¹, Kaspars Mālnieks², Linards Lapčinskis³, Martin Timusk⁴, Kaspars Pudzs⁵, Martins Rutkis⁵

Affiliations

¹ Research Laboratory of Functional Materials Technologies, Faculty of Materials Science and Applied Chemistry, Riga Technical University, Paula Valdena 3/7, 1048 Riga, Latvia. Electronic address: andris.sutka@rtu.lv.
² Research Laboratory of Functional Materials Technologies, Faculty of Materials Science and Applied Chemistry, Riga Technical University, Paula Valdena 3/7, 1048 Riga, Latvia.
³ Institute of Technical Physics, Faculty of Materials Science and Applied Chemistry, Riga Technical University, Paula Valdena 3/7, 1048 Riga, Latvia.
⁴ Institute of Physics, University of Tartu, W. Ostwaldi Str. 1, 50411 Tartu, Estonia.
⁵ Laboratory of Organic Materials, Institute of Solid State Physics, Kengaraga 8, 1063 Riga, Latvia.

Abstract

Embedding additional ferroelectric dipoles in contacting polymer layers is known to enhance the performance of triboelectricnanogenerator (TENG) devices. However, the influence of dipoles formed between the triboelectric surface charges on two contacting ferroelectric films has been ignored in all relevant studies. We demonstrate that proper attention to the alignment of the distinct dipoles present between two contacting surfaces and in composite polymer/BaTiO₃ ferroelectric films can lead to up to four times higher energy and power density output compared with cases when dipole arrangement is mismatched. For example, TENG device based on PVAc/BaTiO₃ shows energy density increase from 32.4 μJ m^-2 to 132.9 μJ m^-2 when comparing devices with matched and mismatched dipoles. The presented strategy and understanding of resulting stronger electrostatic induction in the contacting layers enable the development of TENG devices with greatly enhanced properties.

Keywords: Devices; Electromagnetic Field; Nanoparticles; Nanotechnology; Polymers.