Performance of a Cantilever Bio-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator (CBB-TENG) based utilising Palm Kernel Shell as Triboelectric Layer

Abstract

The aim of this work is to evaluate the performance of a Cantilever Bio-Based Triboelectric Nanogenerator (CBB-TENG) based on the palm kernel shell (PKS) as triboelectric layer. The application is to harvest sufficient amount of power for low power sensor node. CBB-TENG is made up of PKS and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) as the triboelectric layers. Theoretically, pairing a negatively-charged material with a positively-charged material to be in contact, either by tapping or sliding, will create electrostatic induction which leads to triboelectricity. Negatively-charged and positively-charged material in this work are PTFE and PKS respectively. Testing was done on PKS as the triboelectric layer. The input force, the thickness and grain size of PKS layer was varied in order to get the optimum parameter results. By using an optimum five layer of fine-grained PKS with the thickness of 0.65 cm and input force of 1.80 N the ideal opened-circuit voltage, VOC produced was 218.80 mV.