Through years of development, the triboelectric nanogenerator has been demonstrated as a burgeoning efficient energy harvester. Plenty of efforts have been devoted to further improving the electric output performance through material/surface optimization, ion implantation or the external electric circuit. However, all these methods cannot break through the fundamental limitation brought by the inevitable electrical breakdown effect, and thus the output energy density is restricted. Here, a method for suppressing air breakdown phenomenon for contact-separation mode TENG in an SF₆ gas environment is proposed. In the SF₆ gas environment, the transferred charge density of the TENG increased from 155.6 mC/m² to 255.6 mC/m², which achieved a 64.3% improvement. The method proposed in this paper can significantly increase the output power of triboelectric nanogenerator, which is of great importance to promote the practical application of triboelectric nanogenerator.

Triboelectric nanogenerator,SF6,Internet of Things