Improving performance of triboelectric nanogenerators by dielectric enhancement effect

Summary As an emerging energy-harvesting technology, enhancing the output performance of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) is crucial for its practical application. Here, a dielectric enhancement effect is firstly proposed to improve the output performance of TENGs. It is found that the dielectric enhancement layer greatly elevates the triboelectrification effect, and the enhanced performance is verified by all types of TENGs. Thus, the output power of alternative current TENG (AC-TENG) and direct current TENG (DC-TENG) realizes 8.5-fold and 2.6-fold enhancement of normal devices, respectively. Besides this, the dielectric enhancement layer with leakage performance is proven to be necessary for DC-TENG to produce a continuous output. Our work provides a simple and universal strategy for elevating the performance of all types of TENGs, which is beneficial to the promotion of large-scale energy harvesting by TENGs.