Achieving High-Instantaneous Pulse Power in Contact-Separation TENG via Series Capacitive Voltage Control Architecture.

Contact-separation triboelectric nanogenerators generate high voltages but deliver minimal power due to impedance mismatch and premature charge dissipation. Here, we introduce a capacitive charge reservoir architecture that decouples energy accumulation from discharge triggering, enabling sequential voltage amplification through floating-layer capacitive coupling. The device employs intermediate charge reservoirs positioned between the triboelectric assembly and spark-gap switch, which accumulate charge over the contact-separation cycle before threshold-triggered discharge. This architecture, namely, Series Capacitive Voltage Control Architecture TENG (SCVC-TENG), achieves a power density of 7.3 MW/m2 and current density of 5.36 kA/m2 at optimal load, representing a 5.93 × 105 and 2.55 × 105 times improvement over conventional contact-separation design. The charge reservoir mechanism enables controlled energy release, leading to a pulsed, high-power mode of operation for 221 W commercial lamps or a continuous mode for powering low-power electronics through inductor-based energy management. The device maintains 99.3% performance over 11 500 cycles during continuous charging, demonstrating that architectural decoupling of charge accumulation from discharge dynamics provides a pathway to high-instantaneous power, along with continuous contact-separation energy harvesting without sacrificing mechanical simplicity or durability.