ELECTROSTATICS NEWSLETTER

May/June 1999 No.144

The Electrostatics Society of America (ESA) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of electrostatics knowledge. It has been my privilege to serve as your President over the past four years. During this time the ESA has gone onto the Internet, the Awards procedures have been streamlined, and an Archivist position has been established with all ESA information now stored in the A. D. Moore Memorial Archive at the University of Michigan. A written record, known affectionately as the ESA Proceedings, now annually documents our activities and allows members who are unable to attend our meetings to be kept up to date on the frontiers of electrostatics. At the same time we continue to keep an informal presence at our meetings to maintain "The Friendly Society" atmosphere that we all enjoy. To help foster a global understanding of electrostatics we have participated with the Institute of Electrostatics Japan in joint meetings and plan to continue to do so in the future. Likewise, we have witnessed our ESA Annual Meetings entering into the electronic-information age with a growing number of talks presented directly from the computer. Furthermore, both formal and informal electrostatics demonstrations now permeate and highlight our meetings.

It would be pretentious of me to imply that I did anything out of the ordinary, and it would be an inexcusable oversight for me to not mention the reason that so much has occurred over these past four years. Namely, special thanks are due to all the members of the Executive Council and all the Committee Chairs and other appointed members who have made up the Governing Body of the ESA. Those who have graciously served the ESA during the past four years include:

ESA Executive Council

Al Seaver, President

Mark Zaretsky, Vice-President

Ed Escallon, Council Member

Mark Horenstein, Council Member

Tom Lee, Council Member

ESA Advisory Board

Emery Miller, Secretary-Treasurer 1995-1997

Tim Erin, Secretary-Treasurer 1997-Present

Bill Smart, Newsletter Editor

Joe Crowley, Publications Committee

Bob Gundlach, Awards Committee 1995-1996

Humphrey Wong, Awards Committee 1996-Present

Anne S. Benninghoff, Archivist

Steve Cooper, Information Awareness Committee

Jayesh Doshi, Publicity Committee

Dale Mashtare, By Laws Committee

Mark Horenstein, Webmaster

ESA Annual Meeting Conference Chairs

Mark Zaretsky, 1995

Glenn Schmieg, 1996

Ed Law, 1997

Joe Crowley, 1998

Mark Horenstein, 1999

I would also like to thank Barb Crowley for her years of dedicated efforts on the Publications Committee as well as Toni Seaver, Missie Bergen and the other spouses who have quietly contributed to the behind the scenes efforts at the various Annual Meetings.

I deeply appreciate all the efforts the Council members, Advisory Board members and Conference Chairs have given to ESA as well as the numerous efforts supplied by those who "help out" at the Annual Meetings. I also want to thank all ESA members for their support over this past four-year period for it has made serving the ESA a pleasant and memorable experience.

I look forward to a continued enjoyment in the ESA as we all help advance the understanding of electrostatics.

For the Friendly Society

Albert E. Seaver

Plans are well under way for ESA'99, the 27th annual conference of the Electrostatics Society of America. Expect a good showing of old and new faces, including numerous talks by individuals who are attending an ESA meeting for the first time. Besides our usual series of formal and informal papers, we'll have a number

of social activities and interesting tours. Join us for the social reception on Tuesday evening, or for the Wednesday evening trip to the "Hall of Electricity" at Boston's Museum of Science where we'll be treated (thanks to the diligent efforts of Costa Chitouras) to a private demonstration of a three-story, 4-MV electrostatic generator built by Van DeGraff himself. Thursday's banquet will include a talk by our now-famous master of the unusual in science, Dr. Glenn Schmieg. Friday's technical sessions will be followed by tours of laboratories and facilities at Boston University, including the B.U. Photonics Center and micro-electromechanical experiments in the Precision Engineering Laboratory. For the sport's fans, I'm pleased to report that the Red Sox will be playing home games on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon at Fenway Park, a short, five-minute walk from the conference site. In addition, Boston's vast array of eateries, restaurants, museums, art galleries, and historic sites beckon the tourist-bound attendee.

I'm also pleased to announce the following late-arriving papers which did not make it into the previously-mailed conference brochure:

"Surface Charge Distribution Analysis by Fluorescent Microsphere Imaging Technique", M.K. Mazumder, K. Tennal, and D. Lindquist, University of Arkansas at Little Rock. (Wednesday afternoon)

" A Micro-Scale Electric-Induction Machine for a Micro Gas Turbine Generator", S. Nagle and J. Lang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Thursday morning)

" The Emergence of Triboelectric Technology in Fabric Filter Bag Leak Detection", Steve Day, Auburn Environmental Systems, Danvers, MA. (Thursday afternoon)

If you're planning on attending the conference and desire on-campus dormitory housing, send in your reservation form and payment IMMEDIATELY, as the official deadline (May 30) has now passed.

The Howard Johnson Hotel will accept reservations at the special ESA rate through June 15.

For the Friendly Society,

Mark Horenstein (mnh@bu.edu)

Conference Chair, ESA'99

A flow of liquid from a charged needle has a surface charge which appears on the subsequent droplets. Quite a few of our members do work in this area.. Such charged droplet generators are often called electrohydrodynamic sprays or electrosprays.. When the charge density is low, electrostatic forces have little effect and motion is determined by gravity and air drag. Empirical formulas are known; for example, with a needle radius of 0.2 mm and a potential between the needle and ground plane of about 4 kV, droplets carry a charge of 3 x 10-11C.

At higher potentials, the electrostatic forces cause the stream to break up into a fine spray. This is often called the cone-jet mode. There is no theory for the charge on these droplets, but the Rayleigh limit (when a droplet fissions) is an upper bound. The Rayleigh limit depends on both the radius of the droplet and the surface tension.

Charged spray are very important for paint spraying and for insecticide spraying. Also, the droplets may be trapped in various field configurations for specialized research and study.

Glenn Schmieg

Each year about 15 million pounds of polyester from transparency film is dumped into landfills. The film is type one polyester, similar to soda bottles. However the film coatings, ink and toner make it more difficult to recycle. Because most local recycling centers will not accept the material, 3M offers such a service. Any amount can be mailed or shipped to 3M Recycle Program, c/o Gemark, 99 Stevens Lane, Exeter, PA 18643. At this facility the material is converted to fiber fill for carpets and office chairs, insulating products, automotive parts and more transparencies. (Ann Arbor News, March 25, 1999 courtesy of Anne S. Benninghoff)

On April 30, 1999 US Patent NO. 5,888,274 was issued to ESA member E. R. Frederick covering a method of specifying and altering electrical properties of filter media so as to enhance the collection of charged contaminants.

The National Fire Protection Association’s Technical Committee on Static Electricity has just finished a new edition of NFPA 77, Recommended Practice on Static Electricity. This is a complete rewrite of the Standard and incorporates numerous changes and improvements, including diagrams depicting appropriate bonding and grounding methods. There are also more in-depth discussions of the fundamentals of static electricity and evaluation of the hazards of static electricity.

The new edition of NFPA 77 is in the internal review process which will end on about August 1, 1999 when it will be published for public review and comments. Interested persons may obtain a copy for review by ordering a copy of the May 2000 Report on Proposals from NFPA’s order Dept. at 1-800-344-3555. There is no charge for single copies. The revised edition may also be obtained from NFPA’s web site at www.nfpa.org

ESA member Bob Benedetti is the NFPA staff coordinator for this project and can be reached at 1-617-770-3000, Ext. 7433 for more information.

Title: International Seminar on the Technology of Inherently Conductive Polymers

Location: Sheridan Conference Center, Toronto, Canada

Dates: September 26-29, 1999

Fee: US $1,050.00

Contact: Dr. Matt Aldisi, Tel: 813-854-4332, Fax: 813-854-5596

E-mail: fractals@infobridge.com

web page: www.conductivepolymers.com

A tutorial covering various aspects of the technology will be given on the first day. The other three days will include one hour lectures by scientists from industry and academia, and a final round table discussion.

Within a single water molecule, hydrogen and oxygen are held together by covalent bonds.. In this type of bonding, electrons are shared between atoms - a purely quantum mechanical effect.

Between neighboring molecules there exist weaker bonds, but not so well understood. Now new work shows that although neighboring water molecules are predominantly held together in ice by electrostatic forces, there is also a significant covalent component. This work has confirmed a prediction made by Linus Pauling in 1935.

Glenn Schmieg