Title: Fabrication of electrospun PVC/PVDF blend tribo-negative layers and evaluation of their physicochemical and triboelectric properties
Authors: Nguyen Thi Thuy Duong,, Le Trong Lu, Vu The Minh
Volume: 10
Issue: 8
Pages: 14-22
Publication Date: 2026/08/28
Abstract:
Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) convert ambient mechanical motion into electricity, but their output is bounded by the charge-accepting capacity of the tribo-negative layer. Fluorinated and chlorinated polymers are the most strongly tribo-negative commodity materials available, yet blends of the two have rarely been assessed as TENG electrodes, and the separate contribution of the shaping process has not been isolated. Here, poly(vinyl chloride)/poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVC/PVDF) blends spanning the full composition range (0:100, 20:80, 50:50, 80:20 and 100:0 by mass) were shaped into ~50 µm layers by electrospinning and by solution casting, deposited on Cu current collectors and tested against an acrylic counter-electrode in vertical contact-separation mode. Electron microscopy showed bead-free randomly oriented fibres that were most uniform at the equimass composition, while FT-IR confirmed that blending was purely physical. Output was strongly non-monotonic in composition: the 50:50 electrospun mat delivered the highest peak-to-peak open-circuit voltage, 442 V, exceeding both neat PVDF (384 V) and neat PVC (196 V), and retained ~80% of its initial output after 10,900 cycles at 5 Hz. Electrospinning outperformed casting at every composition, by 3.43-fold for neat PVDF but by only 1.36 to 1.85-fold for the PVC-rich compositions. Each value rests on a single determination, but the pattern is consistent with a geometric contribution common to all films acting together with an additional, PVDF-specific contribution.