On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Frederick Sparber wrote: > Bill Beaty wrote: > > > > Frederick Sparber wrote: > > > > > Bill. Wouldn't the water vapor (or the O2 which has a high electron > > > affinity) in the air flowing over the red hot hair dryer heating element > > > cause the loss of electrons to the air stream? > > > > Is the air coming from a hair dryer also a flow of charge? > > I've never heard of this,
> With over 500 "small ions"per cubic centimeter, plus the larger ions in air a > few cfm would > represent a lot of charge in the air going through the dryer. Where does the number 500 come from? I hope you aren't talking about cosmic ray ionization (since that creates equal amounts of + and -, so the moving air would be slightly conductive but have no overall charge flow.) > Seems that a clothes dryer pulls charge from the air going through it, That's not a hair dryer. Clothes dryers don't do anything to the air. Instead, different types of clothing become charged by "friction" when they touch (actually it's not friction, it's called Electrification by Contact.) It's a low-humidity environment, so "frictional" charging becomes very significant. To eliminate dryer-cling, just inject an extremely small amount of oil into the environment. The the clothing fibers develop a molecule-thin coating of oil, so when different pieces of cloth touch each other, it's actually oil touching oil, so the Triboelectric Series for cotton touching Rayon (etc.) does not apply. That's how "anti static dryer sheets" work: they cover your clothes with oil! > > Also, it would charge any object struck by the air, and I don't think this > > happens. > > > The clothing removed from the dryer still have the charge. Use a HAIR DRYER where there are no large pieces of different warm dry insulating clothes being placed in contact and pulled apart again. I'd try suspending a sheet of steel wool from nylon fishing line, connect it briefly to ground in order to start out neutral, then spray it with air from a blow-dryer. If the steel wool becomes charged, this shows that the blow-dryer is emitting charges into the air. (It's easy to detect charged objects by rapidly waving an oscilloscope probe near the object, just set the scope to DC coupling and use the most sensitive range.) (((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) ))))))))))))))))))) William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb at amasci com http://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-789-0775 unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
