Winter is coming. The humidity will drop. Electrostatic discharges will rise. We will all be shocked again, and again – it’s a reality of manufacturing processes in the winter and can cause such a nuisance.
Static Electricity is created by materials such as paper, plastic or textiles rubbing, peeling, or sliding across a surface. Materials normally contain and equal number of positive and negative charges. As the two surfaces come into contact electrons will transfer from one material to another. If these surfaces are not electrically grounded, they will gather a charge. For instance, if you rub your sock across the carpeted floor before you reach out and touch your kid sister over the holidays, you may be able to shock her enough to take her eyes off of Instagram. This is the same phenomenon that you can also see in lightning storms on a meteorological scale.
Electrostatic discharges may only be a nuisance to you and me as we climb in and out of cars, open door knobs, or touch our computers, but for a number of industries the rise in static will make producing quality products in a timely manner significantly more difficult. Printing, packaging and slitting operations can be stopped or ruined by static. Some of these applications require a very long static eliminators between 60 and 108 inches.
For wide web applications EXAIR builds Long Ion Bars up to 108″ in length. These bars can clean up printing errors caused by static in large inkjet printers. They can eliminate static before or after a slitting operation. Also, they can eliminating static before painting or staining. These bars will be invaluable to the paper, textile, film or plastic industry as winter continues to lower the humidity.
The folks at Plant Engineering have nominated EXAIR Long Ion Bars for Product of the Year. If you are currently using the Long Ion Bar or another EXAIR product, please go vote for our products in the Plant Engineering Product of the Year Award.
Dave Woerner
Application Engineer
@Dave_Woerner
DaveWoerner@EXAIR.com