Found these experiments:
------
Antioxidants dispel static electricityCheap coating helps electric charge to dissipate from plastics and rubber.
Richard Van Noorden
19 September 2013
It might be called a shock finding. Coating plastic or rubber materials with antioxidants such as vitamin E stops static charge from building up on the polymer’s surface, chemists report today1. The discovery could prove a cheap solution to problems such as dust clinging to plastic, static electric shocks, or the sparks that damage television circuits and fry computer motherboards.
Children can have fun with static electricity — when they rub balloons on their hair, the rubber and hair stick together because of the attraction between transferred charged particles. But static charge that builds up on industrial components, such as plastic fuel filters on cars or inside semiconductor parts, can lead to potentially dangerous electric sparks and a build-up of dust.
The puzzle with static electricity, explains Bartosz Grzybowski, a physical chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is that although charged particles should repel each other when they land on an insulating surface, making them spread evenly across a material and leak back into the air, they actually form stable, long-lived clumps. This leads to the build-up of large amounts of tightly confined static charge, enough to abruptly discharge when a conductive path becomes available: for example, shooting through a human body to a metal railing, or sparking through air like a miniature lightning bolt.
Vitamin treatment
Grzybowski’s team reports in Science that it has solved the mystery. The researchers examined under the microscope the patterns of electric and magnetic charge created when charged particles land on polymer surfaces. They discovered that charged particles are stabilized by radicals — reactive molecules with spare, unbound electrons that form when chemical bonds are broken on a surface. The radicals share some of the burden of the electric charge; without them, charged particles would not be able to clump together so tightly. The answer, the team says, is to apply surface coatings that react chemically with the radicals, mopping them up. Such coatings could include vitamin E, among other cheap, non-toxic antioxidants. Some of these chemicals are in fact already added to the blends from which polymers are made, in order to scavenge the radicals formed when ultra-violet light damages plastic - but haven't been used as antistatic coatings.
The researchers proved their case by using solutions of radical scavengers to coat common polymers, such as beads of polystyrene. Sure enough, after being shaken up to gain static charge, the coated beads shed their static electricity within minutes. The scientists also used their anti-static coating to protect a transistor component, showing that it remained undamaged when charged particles were shot at it from an ion gun. “It’s actually quite incredible that the answer is so simple,” says Grzybowski.
Other researchers contacted by Nature found the work exciting. The real advance is the insight into the root causes of static electricity, says Michael Dickey, who researches nano-electronics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “It is very clever in the simplicity of addressing an old problem,” he adds.
Dealing with the effects of static electricity is "a very big problem in industry,” says Fred Roska, a researcher at 3M in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He adds that simply finding ways to supply charged particles that neutralize the static charge building up on polymers during semiconductor manufacturing, for example, is a billion dollar market. Industrial firms also deal with static electricity by modifying the materials they use: either by covering polymers with water or gel coatings through which charge can dissipate, or by inserting conductive strips of metal or carbon nanotube into a polymer blend to provide a path for static charge to fade away.
But those solutions involve trade-offs, Grzybowski says, such as making a plastic more conductive, and do not address the underlying cause of the static build-up. And he thinks that the antioxidant coatings will prove a cheaper solution. He says that he has patented the discovery and hopes to license it to companies such as 3M and Dow.
Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13786
References
Baytekin, H. T., Baytekin, B., Hermans, T. M., Kowalczyk, B. & Grzybowski, B. A. Science 341, 1368–1371 (2013).
http://www.nature.com/news/antioxidants ... ty-1.13786--------
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6040/308The Mosaic of Surface Charge in Contact Electrification
H. T. Baytekin,
A. Z. Patashinski,
M. Branicki,
B. Baytekin,
S. Soh,
B. A. Grzybowski*
Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
E-mail: grzybor{at}northwestern.edu
Abstract
When dielectric materials are brought into contact and then separated, they develop static electricity. For centuries, it has been assumed that such contact charging derives from the spatially homogeneous material properties (along the material’s surface) and that within a given pair of materials, one charges uniformly positively and the other negatively. We demonstrate that this picture of contact charging is incorrect. Whereas each contact-electrified piece develops a net charge of either positive or negative polarity, each surface supports a random “mosaic” of oppositely charged regions of nanoscopic dimensions. These mosaics of surface charge have the same topological characteristics for different types of electrified dielectrics and accommodate significantly more charge per unit area than previously thought.
----
A Shocking New Understanding of Static ElectricityA new study has found that the age-old understanding of this everyday phenomenon—one item becoming positively charged while the other becomes uniformly negative—is incorrect.
Grzybowski admits it's bizarre to find a huge surprise in a topic that has been studied since Greek polymath Thales of Miletus first rubbed amber on wool in 600 B.C., and found it could then attract light objects like feathers. Leading lights such as Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday have studied the phenomenon, but they too reached the same conclusion. "One assumption common to all these models is that one material was positively charged, and one negatively charged," Grzybowski says. "This is actually not true."
Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised: Static electricity is a weird phenomenon to begin with, arising from contact between two insulators—materials that don't conduct electricity, but can create it when rubbed together. To test it in the lab, Grzybowski and colleagues used not balloons, but materials like the common polymers PDMS and Teflon. He pressed samples of insulators together before separating them (rubbing them could create more electrification but would make results harder to analyze). He then used Kelvin probe microscopy to measure molecular charges in the material. With this technique, a scientist runs a tiny probe over the microscopic hills and valleys of surfaces, and the probe vibrates differently over differently charged regions, creating a map of the charges. That's how Grzybowski saw that each material had a random patchwork of positive and negative charges, and neither was uniformly charged. In addition, his tests showed that PDMS and Teflon exchange silicon and fluorine atoms upon contact, a more significant transfer of material than ever previously shown.
Case Western Reserve University chemical engineer Daniel Lacks says this new understanding is both fascinating and surprisingly practical. For instance, photocopying depends on precisely delivering charges to ink particles so they end up in the right place on the paper. But Lacks recalls several examples of powders becoming unexpectedly charged and exploding during manufacturing, something engineers could hopefully avoid with better knowledge of static electricity. That knowledge could also lead to better industrial coatings, which would help people like the manufacturer of polyethylene that Lacks advises. During the creation of polyethylene, sometimes the particles get unexpectedly charged and stick to the side of the reactor vessel. "Then you have to shut it down and clear out the chunks with chainsaws and blowtorches," he says.
Grzybowski's new study also provides new puzzles for scientists to investigate. While the new study overturns some older beliefs about static electricity, it doesn't fully explain how the phenomenon works. "It's a great day when you come to the office and somebody shows you that your beliefs are wrong," UCLA physicist Seth Putterman says.
Putterman says one thing that remains unexplained after this new study—and surprises him—is that the geometry of the charge pattern (that map of the different charges) doesn't change significantly as the two statically charged object move together and the charge decreases. To him, this implies that ions that move around easily on an object's surface are not causing static electricity. If they were, they should change the charging pattern that Grzybowski's team saw on the surface, he says. "To me this means you have extra electrons trapped deep inside the material causing the [static electricity], and they can't go walking around the surface as would ions," he says. That's because the electrons are bound up inside the material.
Whatever the explanation proves to be, Harvard University chemist Logan McCarty says it's incredible something so common as static electricity remains such a mystery. "It's certainly more complicated than we have naively believed for many years."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technol ... lectricity
On the Windhexe: ''An engineer could not have invented this,'' Winsness says. ''As an engineer, you don't try anything that's theoretically impossible.''