Design Optimization of Soft-Contact Freestanding Rotary Triboelectric Nanogenerator for High-Output Performance

The soft-contact freestanding rotary triboelectric nanogenerator (FR-TENG), with the capabilities of high output performance and excellent efficiency, presents interesting applications in driven nonequilibrium plasma jets, mass spectrometry, electrospinning, and so on. For enhancing the output performance of FR-TENG, detailed and in-depth research focusing on the design method is discussed in this paper, mainly consisting of the following four parts: 1) design reasonable geometric structure, 2) select triboelectric layers, 3) choose a reasonable signal acquisition, and 4) investigate influencing factors. Benefiting from this four-step systematic research, a modified FR-TENG with better output performance is successfully constructed. A corresponding open-circuit voltage density of 1.27 × 10⁵ V m⁻² is achieved, which is over twofold higher compared to the largest one among the previous similar articles. Therefore, the four-step systematic research is demonstrated to remarkably enhance the output performance of the soft-contact FR-TENG. This work not only presents a modified FR-TENG with ultrahigh voltage density that inhibits bacterial corrosion, enables high-voltage electrostatic dust removal, and enables impressive current cathodic protection of marine pipelines and urban buried pipelines, but also can be regarded as guidance for the design of soft-contact FR-TENG.