Quantification of Flow Electrification in the Context of a Tank Being Filled With a Dielectric Liquid

Abstract

Contact of the walls of a tank with the liquid it is being filled with creates an electrical double layer of charge at the interface between the two materials, independently of their respective nature. On the liquid side, movement of this layer of electrical charge by the filling or draining of the tank induces a streaming current, which provides useful information concerning the intrinsic flow electrification phenomenon occurring near the tank walls. Indeed, the flow of the liquid modifies the electroneutrality of the solid/liquid interface, which is reestablished with the generation of a new electrical charge in the electrical double layer via complex physicochemical reactions in the form of a wall current. Moreover, this process of charge generation is modified if the liquid entering the tank already contains a certain amount of charge and may even invert the sign of the charge generated. This paper provides a detailed description of an experimental setup that allows measuring, the amount of charge entering with the liquid in a tank being filled and the intrinsic amount of charge generated at the wall of the tank independently of the charge coming with the liquid. These methods were validated by analytical models with an acceptable precision level for an industrial approach. Techniques for analyzing the impact of the charge entering the tank on the one generated intrinsically at the walls are also explored, but their validation is still under study.