Validation of a Platform for the Electrostatic Characterization of Textile

Hasan Riaz Tahir,Lieva Van Langenhove,Didier Van Daele,Benny Malengier

doi:10.3390/electronics11010115

Abstract

Floor covering samples of different thickness, pile height, pile design, materials, construction methods, and applied finishes were selected for electrostatic characterization with a standard plotter platform and a newly designed digital platform. There is an existing standard ISO 6356 in which the voltage generated by a human walking on the carpet is measured with human involvement under controlled conditions. A walking person performs the original test procedure to generate the electrostatic charge and manually calculates results. In contrast, the newly designed system does not require a person to calculate peaks and valleys for the generated electrostatic charges, which offers advantages in terms of accuracy, consistency, and reproducibility, and eliminates human error. The electronic platform is extended with an automated foot for a fully automated test, called “automatic mode”, that has a fixed capacitive and resistive circuit, in replace of human body resistance, and capacitance that varies from person to person and over time. The procedure includes both the old and new platforms, where the new platform is placed in a “human walking” mode to compare the two and validate the new device. Next, all the floor coverings are tested in automatic mode with the automated foot to compare and validate results. We conclude that the new testing device can fully characterize the electrostatic behavior of textile without the involvement of a human, which offers advantages in terms of accuracy, consistency, and reproducibility.

Highlights

Static electricity may cause an unpleasant, but otherwise harmless, shock when a person touches a door handle after walking just a few steps on a dry, insulated carpet
The automated foot mode with the same frequency of tapping, a specific foot pressure, and height of tapping with 8 cm diameter foot generates a waveform that differs from the human walking on the carpets
The ranking of materials is different. This can be partly attributed to taking the human out of the equation and partly because the parameters of the automated foot have not yet been investigated, and are selected and fixed to correspond to human walking

Summary

Introduction

Static electricity may cause an unpleasant, but otherwise harmless, shock when a person touches a door handle after walking just a few steps on a dry, insulated carpet. Static electricity was the first type of electric process known to man [1,2,3]. This has resulted in the appearance of several excellent, but specialized, treatises on the topic. Textiles and other materials can be charged with static energy induced by friction. This can be quite a problem, especially with floor coverings, as people walking on them can accumulate high-voltage electrical charge. One of the tests to determine the electrostatic characteristics is the walking test, defined in the ISO 6356 standard [6] In this test the voltage generated by a person walking on carpet is measured

Methods

Results

Conclusion