Energy Harvesting

Textile Triboelectric Nanogenerator Output Voltage & Power

Hundreds of volts, tens of microwatts. The charge is tiny — only the voltage is dramatic, and voltage is not power.

Device Fabric pair
µC/m²

Measured for the specific material pair after conditioning.

cm²
mm
Motion & Circuit In use
Hz

About 1.5 to 2 Hz for ordinary walking.

%

Open-Circuit Voltage

— V

Peak voltage at full separation with no load connected

Electrical Output

Charge per Cycle
— nC
Energy per Cycle
— µJ
Average Power
— µW
Usable Power After Rectification
— µW
Device Capacitance
— pF
Matched Load Impedance
— MΩ

The matched load lands in the tens of megohms to gigohms, and that is the practical problem with TENGs — almost nothing you would want to power presents an impedance anywhere near it, so the power actually delivered into a real circuit falls well short of the average shown here even before rectifier losses. Charge density is not a material constant either: it collapses with humidity, drifts with surface wear and decays between contacts. Treat these figures as an upper bound from an idealised parallel-plate model.

Textile Triboelectric Nanogenerator Output Voltage & Power — free, with the formula and a worked example, at Textile School.