| MadSci Network: Chemistry |
Fabric softeners give your clothes a chemical coating
which interferes with the electrostatic charge-separation process.
"Static electricity" (also called charge separation)
occurs whenever three conditions exist:
Clothes dryers provide and ideal situation
for this. Cloth is an insulating material. The humidity
during the end of the drying cycle is low. And usually
there are many different types of cloth crashing together
inside the dryer.
Fabric softener sheets work by
giving the cloth a chemical coating which prevents their
real surfaces from touching each other. When clothes in the
dryer touch together while tumbling, it's the fabric
softener on the surfaces of the cloth which does the actual
touching. Condition number three is elminated. SAME is touching
SAME, so no "static" is created. After all, you
can create "static" by rubbing a balloon on your hair,
but if you ever tried rubbing two balloons together
(or two heads together), you'll have found that it doesn't
work. You need two different kinds of material.
"BOUNCE" fabric softener FAQBut WHY does "static cling" ever happen in the first place? Ah, this is a very interesting question because it rubs our noses in the fact that all objects are actually held together by electrical forces. "Static cling" is a weak and wimpy example of the same kind of force which lets a solid be a solid. Atoms cling to each other because of "static cling" between opposite charges. The strongest steel cables get their strength from the electrostatic attraction that occurs between negative electrons and positive protons. Without this attractive force, matter would become gas, and solids and liquids could not exist. When atoms are pulled away from each other, the electrical attraction force usually vanishes. But in some cases it does not, instead it just becomes weaker.
http://www.bouncesheets.com/FAQs.html#static
The details of "static electricity" production is poorly
understood, but below is the usual explanation.
When two materials are touched together,
the atoms on their surfaces meld together. If the surfaces
are made of two different kinds of material, then the atoms
on one side will attract their electrons more strongly than
the atoms on the other side. If you separate the materials,
one surface ends up with more negative electrons than positive
protons. This gives it a negative imbalance of
electric charge. The other surface will have more postive
protons left behind, and fewer negative electrons. It will
have a positive charge imbalance. Negative attracts
positive, so the two surfaces will cling together. Even
if you pull the surfaces away from each other, they will
keep on attracting. Sometimes you can pull a sock from
a fluffy sweater, then drop the sock and it will leap back
to the sweater again.
One last thing: "static" has nothing at all to do with
being unmoving. "Static electricity" is not electricity
which is static. Instead, it is an imbalance of electric
charge. It is a situation where you have more electrons
than protons in a substance, or when you have more protons
than electrons. Another way to say it: if you can take
some atoms apart and pull their electrons far away from their
protons, THAT is what we call "static electricity."
ELECTRICITY MISCONCEPTIONS
http://www.amasci.com/miscon/miscon.html"STATIC ELECTRICITY" PROJECTS AND EXPERIMENTS
http://www.amasci.com/emotor/statelec.html
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