Circuit Modeling Approach for Analyzing Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Energy Harvesting

Triboelectric Nanogenerators (TENGs) are relatively new energy harvesting devices that show promise for effectively capturing vibrational energy. However, they have unique capacitive characteristics unlike many existing energy harvesting transducers. In order to develop proper power conversion circuits for TENGs, they must be first modeled and analyzed. A TENG is emulated using numerical simulation and analyzed to determine the optimal output resistance and its dependance on frequency. Simulation results indicate that lower frequency and lower amplitude of the plate movement requires very high optimal output resistance, while higher frequency and higher amplitude decreases the optimal output resistance to a more reasonable value.