Study of Absolute Humidity on a Textile Triboelectric Generator

Triboelectricity is a phenomenon that has been discovered almost 2500 years ago with limited applications. However, over the last decades has gained great attention due to the development of Tribo Electric Generators (TEGs) which harvest the electrical energy that is produced when mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy by combing the triboelectric effect and the electrostatic induction. Textile based Tribo Electric Generator offer many options for energy harvesting, since there is an enormous variety of textiles consisting of various structural patterns and structural units making them easily compatible with TEGs. At the present work we investigate the effect of the absolute humidity (AH) at the performance of a textile based TEG device. Five sets of samples were examined under our textile based TEG prototype varying the external absolute humidity. These samples had the same structural characteristics and were the same in size but they had developed from different raw materials such as acrylic, polyester (PES), cotton, wool and modal. It was observed that absolute humidity affects significantly the outcome voltage and in particular the outcome voltage is decreasing when the absolute humidity is increasing for all set of samples.