Qin Yong, a professor at the School of Physical Science and Technology, has made significant progress in his research on triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG). The research result, titled “A Self-improving Triboelectric Nanogenerator with Improved Charge Density and Increased Charge Accumulation Speed,” was published in Nature Communications, a sub-journal of Nature. (Publication URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06045-z)
Charge density is an important parameter in evaluating the performance of TENG. Improving the charge density of TENG is the fundamental method to adjust output voltage, current, and power. However, as the air can be easily broken down in an environment with high electric fields, the increase in the charge density of TENG is much limited.
Led by Prof. Qin Yong, a research team consisting of Dr. Cheng Li, Dr. Xu Qi, Dr. Zheng Youbin and doctoral candidate Jia Xiaofeng used the capacitor's storage capacity to effectively improve the charge density while avoiding air breakdown rendered by high electric field strength. With this method, they managed to increase the charge density of TENG to 490 μC/cm2, twice the highest charge density of a TENG currently operating in an airy environment. Besides increasing the output of the TENG, the team also boosted the speed of charge accumulation by 4.8 times. Their research provides a new idea for improving the performance of TENG and serves important implications for the application of TENG. Peer reviewers evaluated the work as an important advance in the field of nanogenerators.
Professor Qin Yong's research team has long been engaged in the research of nano energy and sensing. He has published 29 papers in high-level academic journals with an impact factor of 10 or higher. His graduate students have obtained many excellent doctoral thesis awards and excellent master's thesis awards in Gansu. One of the four-year undergraduates supervised by Prof. Qin even published an article inAdvanced Materials with an impact factor of 21.95. Throughout the years, Prof. Qin has trained numerous excellent undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The first author and third author of the article, Dr. Cheng Li and Dr. Zheng Youbin, were both Prof. Qin’s students during their doctoral studies. Dr. Cheng now works at Zhongyuan Institute of Technology. Dr. Zheng now works at the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research was funded by the Young Scholars’ Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation and other projects.
Click here to find out Prof. Qin Yong's research page: http://yqin.lzu.edu.cn/
