Simple Technique for the Electrical Characterization of Triboelectric Nanogenerators and Other Kinetic Energy Harvesters with Electret

This study presents a novel approach to characterize and define a simple Spice model for a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). It combined the measurement of the built-in surface voltage $V_{\text{TE}}$ with the dynamic capacitance variation of the transducer. The proposed approach focuses on the indirect measurement of $V_{\text{TE}}$ (which is assumed to be constant) instead of the open-circuit voltage $V_{\text{OC}}(t)$ . The extraction of $V_{\text{TE}}$ is obtained using the saturation voltages of either half-wave or full-wave rectifiers, while the dynamic TENG capacitance is based on the phase-shift measurement in a $RC_{\text{TENG}}$ circuit. This approach was validated experimentally with a TENG consisting of two 625 cm ² aluminum electrodes, one of which was coated with a $52\ \mu \mathrm{m}$ PFA tribo-layer.