Research on dynamics of bouncing ball in triboelectric nanogenerator

Abstract

Bouncing ball based Triboelectric Nanogenerator (BB-TENG) can be used to harvest vibrational energy and sense signal for self-powered sensor in the non-resonant zone because of its non-spring vibration system. The energy harvesting efficiency and sensing effectiveness are significantly affected by the dynamics of the bouncing ball. However, due to the chaotic and nonlinear mechanics, the dynamics of the bouncing ball inside BB-TENG and the corresponding influencing factors have not yet been revealed, which restricts the development of high-efficiency BB-TENG. In this work a method based on dynamics simulation and test bench experiment is to be proposed and the ‘Takeoff’, ‘Well-Contact’, ‘Self-Spin’, and ‘Rich-Contact’ of the bouncing ball with the plate electrodes will be investigated. The kinetic model established based on the Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical Systems (ADAMSs) is verified through experiments to confirm the reliability of the simulation results. It is found that ‘Well-Contact’ of the bouncing ball makes BB-TENG harvest energy efficiently. The factors for ‘Well-Contact’ and their influence are investigated, and the critical frequencies for ‘Well-Contact’ of the bouncing ball at each vibration excitation amplitude are obtained. ‘Self-Spin’ of the bouncing ball produced by unbalanced excitation torque is found to increase energy harvesting, and the excitation frequency significantly determines the energy of the ‘Self-Spin’. When the external excitation acceleration reaches a critical value, the ‘Rich-Contact’ of the bouncing ball is found, and the amount of charge transfer for BB-TENG will not increase, which is termed saturated condition. Therefore, the results of this work help improve the design and application of high-efficiency BB-TENG.

Advances in Marine Self-Powered Vibration Sensor Based on Triboelectric Nanogenerator

“…The excellent performance of HSI-TENG makes it have great potential in mechanical monitoring and provides a novel strategy for self-powered machinery monitoring. Similarly, Du et al also demonstrated the bouncing-ball triboelectric sensor (BB-TENG) with a high signal-to-noise ratio of 34.5 dB at the vibration frequency of 10 Hz to 50 Hz by using the same structure of single ball forced vibration [85,148].…”

“…As a new research field, TENGs have achieved remarkable results in the application scenario of ship and ocean engineering [30,[79][80][81][82][83]. It is used to convert marine mechanical vibration into reliable and obvious electrical signals to characterize the working condition of marine equipment or marine environmental parameters, which lays the foundation for the development of intelligent marine sensor network [84][85][86][87][88][89]. Some teams have been engaged in related research and have achieved some results.…”

“…Wang's team of Beijing Institute of Nano-Energy and Systems has made great contributions to marine environmental monitoring based on TENG [90][91][92][93]. Xu's team of Dalian Maritime University has done some research on ship equipment condition monitoring based on vibration sensors [85,[94][95][96]]. Wu's team of China University of Geosciences has done extensive research on self-powered downhole TENG-based vibration sensors [97,98].…”

Flexible capacitive pressure sensors with micro-patterned porous dielectric layer for wearable electronics

“…In particular, scientists have put great efforts into designing novel pressure/strain sensors. According to their sensing mechanisms, these advanced pressure/strain sensors can be classified as resistive [4,19,20], capacitive [4,18,21,22], triboelectric [9,23,24], and piezoelectric [25] modes [26]. The capacitive pressure/strain sensors, consisting of two soft electrodes sandwiching a flexible dielectric layer, possess high sensitivity, low detective range, and simple fabrication process [7,27].…”