초록 |
In our living environment, there is abundance of energy in the forms of solar, thermal, mechanical, chemical, biological, and magnetic. In order to satisfy the worldwide long-term energy needs and to achieve the sustainable and maintenance-free operation of micro/nanosystems, energy harvesting has been developed as a group of technologies to generate electricity from the ambient environment. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have great potential to produce electrical energy by harvesting environmental energy from air flow, wind, waves, vibrations and even human motion. Many studies for developing high performance TENGs have been performed and are still on-going. The surface morphology plays a significant role in enhancing output power. Therefore, many studies have focused on the design and synthesis of novel materials to improve the performance of TENGs. Previously, high output power from TENGs has been achieved using high-speed rotating systems, multi-stack systems, and sliding systems. In those TENG systems, high output power was achieved if a high input energy was captured via high contact frequencies or high contact loads. However, it is difficult to constantly supply high energy because the environmental energy depends on region, weather, population and other factors. Furthermore, obtaining high output power based on high input energy can result in low power conversion efficiency (PCE), which is defined as the ratio of output energy to input energy. Therefore, our goal is to improve the output energy using the same materials and the same input energy to provide a high PCE for future TENG systems. In this study, we report such a gear-based and cam-based kinematic design for a TENG system to sustainably enhance output energy at a given input energy. Our results may offer an effective design for TENG systems to generate enhanced PCE and sustainability for traditional TENGs. |