Proton Beam Writing Fabrication of Micro-Patterns in Dielectric Films for Improving Output Voltage Triboelectric Nanogenerators

Proton beam writing (PBW) has been realized as a micro/nanofabrication technique that uses a focused proton beam to directly pattern on the materials. At Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) in Japan, we have utilized the PBW equipment with 1 MeV proton microbeam to precisely create micro-patterns with different shapes (circles, hexagons, pentagons, squares, and triangles) in poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) dielectric films spin-coated on Cu electrodes. In this work, the micro-patterned PMMA films/Cu electrodes were applied as one dielectric surface of the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) to generate the electrical energy from the mechanical energy. The results show that the output voltages of the TENG devices were increased by modifying PMMA films with micro-patterns (except the micro-pentagons) and varied depending on the shapes.