An online program for calculating the figure-of-merits of triboelectric nanogenerators

Recently, an online program for calculating the figure-of-merits (FOM) of triboelectric nanogenerators has been developed by Prof. Zhong Lin Wang’s group, from Georgia Institute of Technology, and Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The calculation website is: http://124.16.153.201:8086/.

The calculation program is based on the paper published in Nature Communications (Ref. Nature Commun., 2015, 6, 8376), which is entitled with “Standards and figure-of-merits for quantifying the performance of triboelectric nanogenerators”. By using this program, the FOM for triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG) can be captured for multiple modes or even any mode. For the contact-separation (CS) mode, single-electrode contact (SEC) mode, and contact freestanding-triboelectric-layer (CFT) mode that have the analytic solutions, the formulae for FOM have been written into the program according to the published paper. Any user can calculate the values of FOM by assigning the structure and material parameters, and also view the relationship curve between structural FOM (FOMS) and maximum separation distance (xmax). For the lateral-sliding (LS) mode, the FOM for xmax < 0.95l (l is the device length) can be directly calculated through the analytic equations. If the xmax >= 0.95l, the maximum open-circuit voltage VOC,max, maximum short-circuit charge QSC,max, and maximum inversion voltage V'max should be provided. For the sliding/rolling freestanding-triboelectric-layer(SFT/RFT) mode (Ref. Adv. Mater. Technol., 2016, 1, 1600017), the VOC,max, QSC,max and V'max should be also provided except the structure and material parameters. The details can be found in the two papers. The program will facilitate the performance comparison for TENGs with different structural and material designs and popularize the standards of TENG.

If you have any questions on this program, please feel free to contact with: Tao Jiang, at Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, CAS, E-mail: jiangtao@binn.cas.cn.