Hi, I'm Gene Felder. I'm the Corporate Product Manager at Desco Industries. We are doing a series of video clips on ESD control. Today we want to answer the question, how does one ground an insulator? What we're going to do with these video clips... If you go to Descoindustries.com, you see there the brand that you purchased, and go to that website. Under the ESD information tab, we'll be having these video clips that you can look at. What I have here are training paddles. One is an insulator, acrylic plastic. The other one, the handle is acrylic plastic, but we have an isolated conductor, a piece of aluminum on it. As I say, how do you ground an insulator?
The answer is you cannot ground an insulator. It's a little bit easier if you look at the metal as a conductor, and at the plastic as a non-conductor. The items that are dissipated, another word we use in ESD control. Dissipated or conductive, is you can ground and remove electrostatic charges to ground. A non-conductor, electrons, electricity does not move freely. We draw the line at a certain point where we call the item insulative, and it does not ground. Let's see if we can demonstrate this. Tribocharging is contact and separation that generates electrostatic charges.
We have a electrostatic field meter here. Here we have about 2,000 volts on the conductor. Over here we have 3,000 or 4,000 volts. Let me try that again. 3,000 or 4,000 volts on the insulator. Let's see if the charge is still here. No, it's been removed. Let me demonstrate that charges can be removed from a conductor. Here I have several thousand volts. I put it on a grounded... I have a ground wire over here, ESD mat. Take it off, and basically all the charge is removed. While we've been doing all that, we still have our non-conductor. I bet it still has quite a charge on it. There it is, 3,000 to 4,000 volts.
I do exactly the same thing to the non-conductor, to the insulator. I put it on an ESD mat that's grounded, and there we have 3,000 or 4,000 volts still on it. Insulators for ESD control are bad news. Dissipate its conductor. If you have it grounded, you can remove electrostatic charges to ground. Let's make sure we have the charge off of this. The conductor, this is an isolated conductor. The charge is gone. I'm going to just put it in proximity. This is inducing a charge. The insulator has a big charge on it, even though we've just removed the charge from the conductor.
Here I have it close proximity. It's not touching. Let's see if a charge has been induced on it. We have over 1,000 volts on that. We just removed the charge. Because there was a charge... In the presence of a charge, we had induction. We induced a charge onto it. Worse than that is, if we ground the conductor in the presence of a charge, instead of removing the charge we will gain a charge. Let's try this again. We've got the conductor. We can remove a charge, but if we do it in the presence of a charge, boom, now we've got 600, 700 volts. 600 volts that are on it. Insulators are bad to have in your ESD protected area, because they cannot be grounded. What can you do with it? Well, basically get rid of it. Whatever the item is, remove it from the ESD protected area.
We do have a product that we sell called Topical Antistat. The item that you have can temporarily be made dissipated and a low charging antistatic by applying this liquid onto the surface. The Topical Antistat will wear all off over time, depending on how much it is handled. The other thing you can do is to replace yours insulative version of whatever the item is in your production facility with an ESD protective version. For example, this matting, most matting are insulative. This is a Statfree T2 mat that we sell. Replace your insulative mat with a ESD protective mat. You can do that with things like document holders, loose leaf binders.
We have a whole range of products that we sell. If you can't remove it, if you don't want to treat it with Topical Antistat, you can get an ESD protective version. If you can't do any of those, what can you do? The only tool to deal with electrostatic charges on non-conductors, on insulators, is neutralizing the charge using ionizers. That's what we have for today. Going over materials, what is conductive and what is non-conductor, also called an insulator. Thanks very much.