A Calculated Capacitive Model based on Liquid-Solid Triboelectric Nanogenerators for Nanofluid Dispersion Detection

Nanoparticle dispersibility characterization plays a crucial role in nanofluids and nanocomposites. The exploration of nanoparticle dispersion detection remains challenging due to the limitations of conventional measurement methods such as the poor reproducibility and greater destruction in characterizing particle size distribution, and the inversion of particle distribution by a bilayer model of nanoparticles has not been studied yet. In this work, a liquid-solid triboelectric nanogenerator (LS-TENG) is reported as a probe to characterize the dispersion of nanoparticles. The LS-TENG is designed in a frequency conversion structure, which requires a liquid volume of only 0.628 mL for detection. The equivalent capacitance model of nanoparticles is proposed, in which the equivalent capacitance values of the characterized particle sizes are calculated to finally obtain the characterization curves of nanofluid dispersion. In addition, the results derived from the proposed method are in good agreement with that of conventional methods. The proposed work provides a novel idea for the dispersibility detection method of nanofluids and nanocomposites.