Research Projects

Triboelectric effect is ubiquitous in day to day life where static charges can be generated when two dissimilar materials come in contact to each other. Despite knowing for prehistoric age this effect was mostly termed in negative connotation until 2012 when Z.L Wang first demonstrated the impact of this effect in harnessing energy using a device called Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG). From then there have been 7000 documents in Web of Science consist of journal article, reviews, conference proceedings and few hundreds patents. Despite many efforts and promise this technology is still crawling and demands more investments in terms of monetary, intellectual and instrumental resources. Getting moderately high voltage by this method is not difficult as shown by many groups however, the major drawback lies is obtaining high output current which is essential to run any devices. Wang and co-worker showed that in the case of TENG devices the generated output current develops from the second term of the Maxwell’s displacement current density (JD) as shown in the following Eq. (1) due to time varying change in polarizations (Ps) of the surface charges. JD=∂D/∂t=ϵ ∂E/∂t+(∂P_s)/∂t (1) In order to improve this generated charges significant efforts have been put forth employing various combination of materials, modifying their interfaces, and doping various conducting particle but the major bottle neck lies in thorough understanding of origin of charges. Although a lot of work has been carried out using various combination of materials still a lot needs to be done. One of the major concerns in today’s world is utilization of waste materials by recycling process to generate a sustainable model in present day’s world. A large numbers of plastics (PAN), PET bottle, waste clothes (polyester or nylon based), paper (lignin) have no place to degrade. However, if such polymers can be utilized by making nanofibre through electrospun technique and explore their charge generation properties. The next question is if these materials can be recycled, can they be used in various environment, different atmospheric pressure or different humidity condition? There have been reasonably good literatures on humidity sensor by triboelectric effect but not many systematic studies on triboelectricity in various atmospheric pressure, humidity condition and various gaseous environment. Here we would like to address this issue by developing an environmental setup where the effect of ambient pressure, different gasses and effect of moisture can be investigated. Further we would like to understand the origin of these surface charges by using various electrical modules of atomic force microscopy such as KPFM, EFM and conducting mapping. Using the developed electro-spun nanowire of any of the above mentioned polymer we would like to put into the shoe soles to make a prototype device to investigate the application of TENG on human motion.