Effect of polymer hygroscopicity on the performance of electrospun tirboelectric nanogenerators

Triboelectric nanogenerator (TEG) as a novel energy harvester has received a great attention since 2011, although the influence of hygroscopicity of triboelectric materials is still lacking. In this paper, we have focused on the effect of hygroscopicity on the output power from the TEG. It was found that under the same mechanical excitation, the output power of the TEG fabricated with hygroscopic polymers (HTEG, represented by PA6) were more vulnerable to the environment humidity compared with TEG fabricated with nonhygroscopic polymers (NTEG, represented by PHBV). The output power of HTEG decreased by 93.3% while the environment humidity increased from 20% to 80%. However, the output power of NTEG only decreased by 14.6% under the same environment humidity changes. This study can contribute not only to the materials selection on designing triboelectric devices to operate in varying environments and extreme conditions, but also to the fundamental understanding of the mechanism of triboelectric effect.