Weird electrostatic story update

[William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com>]

On 8/6/96,  William Beaty <billb@eskimo.com> wrote:

> Here's an odd story.  I heard it second-hand, so I'm not totally
> confident of its accuracy.  I have a call in to the originator.
> A friend attended the 1995 ESD assn. symposium where a 3M engineer told
> of an interesting phenomenon at a factory in the south.  The humidity was

I talked with Dave Swenson, the 3M engineer involved.  The geometry was
different than I originally heard.  A roll of PET plastic film 20ft. long
was being unspooled.  The sheet of film traveled 20ft upward, passed over
rollers, traveled 20ft horizontal, then down into "slitting" machines
where it was put onto smaller spools.  The film traveled at 1000f/min
(10mph). The film had previously been processed so that its two faces were
dissimilar, so when it was peeled from the main roll, charge separation
occurred.  And so the charged film formed a sort of huge tent-like
structure which one could walk under. 

The e-field around the equipment was so strong that workers could not
approach it for fear of triggering huge discharges.  When the humidity was
low, an unusual effect took place: if you attempted to pass under the
"tent" you were stopped by something like "an invisible wall."
Additionally, the forces prevented you from turning your body, and you had
to walk backwards to move away.

This from a large sheet of highly-charged plastic!

Question: could the e-fields from such a setup be strong enough to prevent
a person from walking forward?  I would think that they would be too weak,
and they would cause attraction rather than repulsion.  Could the e-fields
affect the nervous system?  Perhaps the strong fields attract something
else which then provides the "wall" effect. Aerosol/polymers?  Dark
matter?  :) 


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William Beaty  voice:206-781-3320   bbs:206-789-0775    cserv:71241,3623
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