Controlling the Kinetics of Contact Electrification with Patterned Surfaces

This communication describes a new approach for controlling static charging (contact electrification), and resulting electrical discharging, that occurs when two contacting materials separate. The prevention of contact electrification is an important problem; unwanted adhesion between oppositely charged materials, spark-initiated explosions, and damage to microelectronic circuitry are some of the deleterious effects of static charging. Current strategies for controlling contact electrification rely upon dissipating an accumulated charge by making contacting surfaces conductive and, therefore, can be difficult to implement with electrically insulating materials. Specifically, using our understanding of the ion-transfer mechanism of contact electrification, we patterned glass slides with negatively charging areas (clean glass) and positively charging areas (glass silanized with a cationic siloxane terminated with a quaternary ammonium group). The rate of charge separation due to a steel sphere rolling on the patterned glass surface correlated linearly with the percentage of the glass surface that was silanized; the rate of charge transfer was minimal when 50% of the glass surface area was silanized. Patterned surfaces also prevented electrical discharges between electrically conducting (bare steel) or insulating (acrylate-coated steel) spheres rolling on the glass, because the rate of charging was sufficiently slow to prevent electric fields greater than the dielectric strength of air to develop. This strategy for preventing static charging therefore does not require one of the two contacting surfaces to be electrically conductive. More generally, these results show that our enhanced understanding of the ion-transfer mechanism of contact electrification enables the rational design of chemically tailored surfaces for functional electrets.