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Investigation on the adhesive contact and electrical performance for triboelectric nanogenerator considering polymer viscoelasticity

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Abstract

The triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is a new mechanical energy harvesting technology in which the typical viscoelastic material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is widely used. Micro-/nano-textures are often fabricated on the PDMS surface to enhance the electrical performance of TENG. As the contact region decreases to micro/nano scale, the adhesive forces become dominant. However, there is still a lack of contact mechanics model considering both material viscoelasticity and the adhesive forces to guide the surface texture design. In this paper, the explicit data-fitting formulas based on the fractional derivative Zener model are firstly derived to identify the viscoelastic constitutive parameters, which can not only avoid the influence of the initial contact point, but also ensure the accurate conversion between the creep compliance and the relaxation modulus function. Then a viscoelastic-adhesive contact model based on the fitted constitutive parameters is established, and the numerical algorithms such as bi-conjugate stabilized (Bi-CGSTAB) method and fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique are employed to analyze the effects of material viscoelasticity and texture sizes on the contact and electrical performance. It is shown that, compared with results from the elastic-adhesive contact model, the contact area ratio based on the viscoelastic-adhesive contact model is significantly larger, which is much closer to the experimental results. Among the selected sizes of pyramid texture, the higher electrical performance can be obtained from the textures with a smaller pitch and a larger width under the heavier applied load. This study can provide a theoretical reference for the design of viscoelastic surface texture of TENG.

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Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51735001 and 11472046).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Chenfei Wang, Xiaoli Wang, Yanqiang Hu, Lizhou Li, Zhihao Li, Heng Wu & Zirui Zhao

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  1. Chenfei Wang
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  2. Xiaoli Wang
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  3. Yanqiang Hu
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  4. Lizhou Li
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Correspondence to Xiaoli Wang.

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12274_2021_3393_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Investigation on the adhesive contact and electrical performance for triboelectric nanogenerator considering polymer viscoelasticity

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Wang, C., Wang, X., Hu, Y. et al. Investigation on the adhesive contact and electrical performance for triboelectric nanogenerator considering polymer viscoelasticity. Nano Res. 14, 4625–4633 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3393-0

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