It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The converting machine were all running clickety clack

In the hopes that production would not be held back

When what to management’s unpleasant surprise,

The static was so bad, it impacted their lives.

The customers were mad, plant workers not fine

All in an effort to meet a tight deadline.

This was no ordinary printing request

It was the Christmas catalog that promoted its best.

In a desperate attempt, out comes the tinsel

Draped over machines, like dawn of a thistle.

The problem at hand, it wasn’t the cure

They needed something more potent that was for sure.

Jingle goes our phone in a desperate plea

Is there someone at Static Clean that can help me?

In times like this, passive won’t bring luck

You need a 4203 static bar, so please contact Chuck.

CHECK OUT OUR MODEL 4203 FOR THE TOUCH CONVERTING STATIC PROBLEMS

WWW.STATICCLEAN.COM  chuck@staticclean.com

Static Clean Logo

    Wishing you a very Happy Holidays from the Static Clean Family!!

 

A New Technology in Town

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The “DC Only” myth

Static Clean has been proud to represent Shishido Electrostatic Limited for over eight years as they continue to set the bar high when it comes to innovative ionization technology used in static control. For years, most high technology companies, especially those in Semiconductor and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) have viewed DC Ionization as the only acceptable type of static controls devices in their ESD Sensitive fabs and processing line. The “DC Only” myth was created almost 20 years ago and since that time it has been an uphill battle for AC corona ionization to be considered. That is about to change.

Achieving Balance

Shishido’s new technology is called HDC-AC, which is a Hybrid Digitally Controlled AC power supply design. One of the major problems with all ionizer products is that the emitters or needles gather particles on the tips. This contamination problem reduces ion output production, which translates to slower static decay rates and it also upsets the positive and negative balance of the ions being created. Simply stated, an unbalanced ionizer can produce more ions in one polarity than the other, which can cause harm to sensitive electronic devices. With the HDC-AC design, less particles are attracted to the emitters in the first place, thus creating long-term stability and performance.

What actually is HDC-AC?

It is a unique, ultra-small, stable AC-type high-voltage power supply that is under patent pending status. It has superior features that are created by using digital control for the input of the wire wound transformer.   By using digital Pulse Width Module (PWM), it allows for greater control of the high-voltage output. How is the new technology implemented into ionizer products? So far, it has been incorporated into the CABX linear static bar, BF-XMB slim and lightweight benchtop ionizing air blower, the BF-X2MB unit, the BF-X4MB wide coverage (400mm) blower and the even wider coverage model BF-6MB, and the BF-OHP-3B Overhead Ionizing air blower. For information on these key products, please visit Static Clean at www.staticclean.com

Guns and Nozzles

Posted on by Jim Patterson

I see my life in terms of music

Being a big music enthusiast, running jam sessions in the barn behind our house and working in the static business always has me thinking of cool names to call our jam band.   The band is made up of four people from our company, Static Clean International and other invited guests. Then it hit me, we will call our band “Guns and Nozzles”.

In our lineup of static control products, some of the key tools to deal with static electricity and particle contamination problems are ionizing air guns and ionizing air nozzles.

Simply stated, they use compressed air or nitrogen to blow off debris and the ionizing components inside of the units make sure that the particles are not reattached back onto the newly cleaned substrate. The latest edition to the ionizing air tools is the Zapp Plus, which features a controller, a sensor eye, a goose-neck for flexibility, a built-in piezoelectric transformer and a fault detector to warn of power supply problems.

Without deviation progress is not possible-Frank Zappa

The Zapp Plus has gained wide acceptance for use with our Particle Trap® 6000, a source capture systems that collects the particles once removed from optics, medical devices, thermoformed trays and any product that requires cleanliness. The Particle Trap® 6000 was developed with a guy named Frank and as corny as it sounds, we’ve thought about calling the product the Frank Zappa. Of course that was never really going to happen, but who can argue with genius of the real Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Guns and nozzles

The Waves

Posted on by Jim Patterson

A thought provoking quote

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours”? Gordon Lightfoot

The real meaning behind the lyrics

There are many kinds of waves, but obviously the waves mentioned above by Gordon Lightfoot are from the song titled, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, about the iron ore ship tragedy on Lake Superior almost 39 years ago.  A carrier ship called the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a bad storm on the lake in 1975.   The severe winter storm was said to have hurricane force winds and waves that were 35 feet high.  The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the best-known disasters in the history of Great Lakes shipping. It got me thinking about all the different waves that we encounter in our everyday lives and the ones that we deal with at our company, Static Clean and how it all might be related. We normally think of the motion of a disturbance of water in a lake or the ocean as a wave.   But, what about other mechanical waves, such as the stadium wave at a sporting event. One can image the fans following the shape of the water and it’s up and down movement. There are also light waves, sound waves and electromechanical waves, but the premise is the same.   The displaced energy in all forms returns to its original position.

What does it have to do with Static Electricity?

In the efforts to control static electricity, the most common power supply to create ions on various neutralizing apparatus is done using a 60 Hz. AC sine wave. In this case the AC stands for Alternating Current and it is mostly related to a specific voltage that is required for ions to occur.   The energy (sine wave cycle) goes between positive and negative and the swing time to complete the cycle is 1/60th of a second.   That means that every 1/120th of second, it is either in positive or negative mode. Static electricity problems are when a material is charged either positively or negatively.   The Static Clean Power supplies were designed to fight unwanted static electricity.   Because of the design, they  will put out energy, create bipolar ions and let nature take its course where opposites attract, thus cancelling out the static problem regardless of polarity.

We are Limited by Your Imagination!

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Intelligence and Imagination

Albert Einstein once said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination” and an unknown author said, “Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination. It seems like they were both “wicked smart”. A twist to being limited by one’s own imagination is being limited by someone else’s imagination. If a person can visualize something that seems impossible, there will most likely be someone who can actually make it a reality.  There are times when I mix up the two words innovation and invention. Innovation refers to the use of a better device, idea or a new process, while invention is the creation of the method or the product itself.

Static Clean’s new Model TSN75E is an example of an innovation that became an invention, which is now Intellectual Property (IP).   It is a high voltage line frequency 50/60 Hz transformer based AC Power Supply, with a special Resistive Output Coupler that provides optimal TSN75e-power-supplyvoltage limiting and load regulation, thus enhancing the reliability of the Static Neutralizing System.

Static Bars and Power Supplies

The number of static bars that can operate on a single power supply is dictated by the length of the static bars, the length of the high voltage cable and the construction of the high voltage cable. (Shielded or non-shielded).   The load is calculated in Pico farads (pF).   Customer kept asking us, can I add one more static bar to my existing power supply, so we created a matrix chart based on the new TSN75E that makes it easier for our customers to make the right choice.  To learn more send an email to techsales@staticclean.com or visit our website for a Live Chat, depending on the time of day.   With that said, have a good day dream and keep using that imagination.

Quantum Theory and Many Are Leery

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Quantum Theory

Quantum physics or in reality, quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of the dual, particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter.    The mathematical formulas of quantum mechanics are abstract and therefore were hard for most people to comprehend because they required an understanding of complex numbers and linear functions. In 1900 the atomic hypothesis was widely understood, but not universally accepted.   These waveforms were considered to be like acoustic resonance. From Wikipedia, the term acoustic resonance is sometimes used to narrow mechanical resonance to the frequency range of human hearing. However, many times the frequency is outside the range of human hearing. You could see what creative means had to be adopted to understand the unknown or unheard.

Grounding Electricity

Everyone understand that most things electrical should be always at ground potential. There are Electrical Codes and the NFPA writes the book on proper grounding.   We make sure our buildings, electrical equipment and appliances are all grounded and ionizers use a ground reference to create positive and negative ions. Sometimes we drive copper rods into the earth to seek proper grounding. One of the first things we look for in malfunctions in equipment is a ground fault. We think in terms of keeping things at “zero”. In the quantum mechanics model it works on a non-zero state, and instead of traditional static it allows for far more dynamic possibilities. Thinking totally outside of the box!!

Young Einstein

In 1905 Albert Einstein, at the age of 26, postulated that the energy of a beam of light is quantized and just a year later he used quantization ideas to study the heat/temperature puzzle of various gases. In 1911 quantization was used to experiments to understand position and speed albert-einsteinand in 1913 quantum mechanics/physics were introduced to gain understanding of the hydrogen atom. This scientific development lost some of its traction with the start of the First World War in 1914.   After the war, quantum mechanics expanded rapidly. We didn’t evolve to understand quantum physics, but the search made it more exciting, but not everyone was excited and quantum mechanics has its main detractors.   Although it has been a century since we established how quantum mechanics “works”, according to cosmologist Sean Carroll, we still don’t know what it really means. He went on to say that it might even be the most embarrassing subject in all of modern physics.

Some of us grew up in an era of Star Trek and the Starship Enterprise that was able to hit Warp Speed and others watched the TV show Quantum Leap, while others watch Carl Sagan in the Science hit Cosmos. Sagan said that at the heart of science, there are two distinguishing features which is uniquely valuable at the foundation of a workable world view. One of these is the self-correcting mechanism that not only allows for, but encourages, an unrelenting process of testing proposition in terms of their workability and falsifiability. The other is an essential balance between two attitudes: “an openness to new ideas, no matter how counter-intuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

Static Clean is proud to have an engineering team that pushes the boundaries of product development, but always with an eye towards verification and certification. “May the Force be with you”.

What does the Lone Ranger, the Lone Star State and the Lone Wolf Have in common?

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Texas Rangers

Manuel Gonzaullas was born in 1891 in Cádiz, Spain to a Spanish father and a Canadian mother who became naturalized US citizens and decided to settle in Texas. When Manuel was 15 years old he witnessed his only two brothers murdered and his parents wounded when bandits attacked their homestead.   Fourteen years later he became a Texas Ranger. He was one of the most respected peace officers in Texas, which is also known as the Lone Star State. In the 1930’s, the discovery of the Texas Oil Fields create many lawless towns including Pecos and Kilgore. Manuel was often sent alone to tame these lawless towns.   He became known as “El Lobo Solo” or in English, the Lone Wolf.   When news spread about oil being discovered, Kilgore’s population exploded from 700 to over 10,000 residents in just two weeks.

The Lone Ranger was created

Maybe in part due to the popularity of Texas Rangers and the Lone Wolf, a radio show about a fictional character called the Lone Ranger first The Lone Rangeraired in 1933 and it went on to be an enduring icon of American culture. The masked man and his faithful sidekick Tonto rode to right injustice and they operated on a strict moral code. The radio show morphed into a long running television series that lasted until 1957 and was actually ABC’s first bit hit.   In 1983 a new television show called Lone Wolf McQuade made its debut and it was about a renegade Texas Ranger who didn’t necessarily follow the rules as he battled drug kingpins with automatic weapons.   It was a long way from the days of the “Old West”.

Plastics rely on Texas Oil

Today Texas is still known for its oil industry. In February it hit a 34 year high with production at 2.9 million barrels per day and Texas at times has been the second biggest oil producer in the world behind OPEC. Texans can’t refine the oil as fast as it is coming out of the ground.   Many industries flocked to Texas to be close to the oil. The plastic industry depends on oil in the manufacturing of all things plastic.   Many of the plastic bags that you see in grocery stores and department stores come out of factories in Texas.  Many industries flocked to Texas to be close to the oil. The plastic industry depends on oil in the manufacturing of all things plastic.   Many of these factories require static eliminators and static generators to keep the plastic from sticking or jamming in the process and Static Clean provides the static bars and static generators are vital to keeping static under control and machines moving.

The Texas Rangers are still in operation with 150 officers that handle unsolved crimes, public corruption and border security operations. In honor of the Texas Rangers their national baseball team shares the same name. In 1930, the population of Texas was 5,824,715 and today it is more than 26,500,000 residents. You have to wonder if the Texas Ranger known as Lone Wolf ever thought that the Lone Star State would explode as it did to become one of the strongest economies in the United States and the world.

The World Unites in Support of Danny Nickerson

Posted on by Jim Patterson

July 25, 2014 marks the date of 6-year-old Danny Nickerson, of Foxboro Massachusetts’, birthday. Danny is a 6-year old with an inoperable brain tumor. His only wish this year was to receive birthday cards on his special day. The Huffington Post wrote an article about Danny & it went viral. Random people, strangers actually, have displayed ‘random’ acts of kindness towards Danny and his wishes. How? They sent him snail mail. Each and every day Danny would go to the PO Box that his parents set up for him & was astonished by the overwhelming flood of mail & love received by complete strangers from all over the world; California, Alaska, Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Norway & Sweden to name a few. Static Clean International, Inc. of Burlington, MA was one of those strangers. Danny has received over 15,000 snail mail birthday cards and still counting.

Word reached Patriots owner, Bob Kraft and he invited Danny and his family to the Patriots training camp this past Friday.  The team had a few surprises up their sleeves including all getting together at midfield to sing Danny happy birthday and present him with a very large birthday card signed by all the players.  Danny who is quite shy, sat there grinning from ear to ear as the Pats sang “Happy Birthday”.  It was a truly special moment for him and his family.

You’re probably wondering what snail mail for Danny and static have in common, right? Have you ever opened snail mail or an envelope or pulled sticky tape off of a surface and seen a flash of light? There is a name for this – triboluminescence; or in other words – a piezoelectric effect. When piezoelectric materials, like sticky or self-adhesive envelopes, are stretched – they generate electricity. When you rip an envelope open – the distribution of positive and negative charges across the envelope may become uneven. When the charges clump in one area – and are either highly positive or highly negative – and you continue to rip open the envelope, the electricity ignites the atoms in the glue & the energy created is released as light.

Not many people would try and solve a static on snail mail problem. However, if you were trying to control the piezoelectric effect from occurring – you may considering our Piezonizer ZAPP II nozzle. It’s a compact AC ionizer with an ultra-small built-in piezoelectric transformer. The excellent ion balance and fast static decay rates make this the ideal choice nozzle to reduce static elimination when space is at a premium.

Sources: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=894.0

Written by: Julianne Patterson – julianne@staticclean.com

Will the Big Bang Happen Again?

Posted on by Jim Patterson

Big Bang…Again?

According to the astrophysicists, the Big Bang that expanded and stretched the universe can’t happen again because the universe is still expanding. Will the expansion continue forever or will there be a day when everything stops? What would that look like?  Like an airplane that defies gravity with the speed of forward motion, do we need to worry about all things in the universe just dropping out of the sky without forward propulsion?

Even such, the Big Bang keeps us wondering about life itself and how insignificant we may be in the overall scheme of existence. From science, we know that atoms are the smallest particle of an element. Are we or even the world itself just atoms in a system where math doesn’t exist to explain how little we are on the ladder of life? Scientists say that all of the ingredients that were gathered at the time of the Big Bang can be found inside the human body. We are matter and matter is defined by anything that has mass and takes up space. Come to think of it, my mother used to tell me something about “just taking up space.”

The Law of Conservation

Besides trying to figure out the universe and solar system, science can be very confusing. For example, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. However, it can change form, as is realized in changing chemical energy to kinetic energy. Ingredients found in dynamite are made up of chemicals, and once the fuse is lit, there is an explosion. The explosion then becomes the kinetic energy and nothing seems to exist afterward, save maybe a few scraps of debris on the ground.

A rule of the above mentioned Law of Conservation of Energy states that perpetual motion cannot exist without an energy source or power to keep it going. This rule seems to support my point at the opening of this post about the expanding universe and going from the Big Bang to continued expansion. At some point, things stop — unless there is another Big Bang to keep things in motion.

Control Static With Our Products

At Static Clean, we manufacture charging power supplies that apply energy to applicators that attack atoms or air molecules to create ions. Of course, that is not the only reason why we build this type of equipment. We are a static control company, which means we also build air ionizers that are used to control static events and prevent explosions on equipment where volatile chemicals vapors are involved in the process.

If static is not kept to low levels explosions can occur. Like the stick of dynamite exploding, companies have to deal with problems associated with converting chemical energy to kinetic energy. For help in controlling static and preventing fires and explosion, contact Static Clean International for expert advice.

Remember the Van de Graaff Generator?

Posted on by Jim Patterson

The Van de Graaff generator was invented in 1929 by American physicist Robert J. Van de Graaff. That’s a great fact, but why did he invent such a contraption?

Flashback to Science Class 

Van de Graaff began experiments to find methods to accelerate particles at very high speeds in order to disintegrate atomic nuclei. We’ve all seen these generators with the aluminum dome on top of a long pole in science class, and if not, we’ve certainly heard about them. Is that what we were doing in science class? Trying to accelerate particles and not just create lightning?

When we were young, we thought it was cool to receive and give people static shocks. When belts made of silk rotate on small motors, they create friction, and therefore static electricity. The belts in proximity to the hollow metal domes are insulated from a ground reference. The charged metal domes can store enough energy to produce a visible discharge, but the current is typically very low. Table top versions of the Van de Graaff generator, as used in science experiments, can reach between 200,000 and 500,000 volts.

Time for a Field Trip? 

The largest Van de Graaff generator in the world, built by its inventor in 1930, is on permanent display at Boston’s Museum of Science. This 15-foot diameter sphere stands atop a 22-foot tall column and has the capability of generating 2,000,000 volts. Three or four times a day, the techs at the museum demonstrate how it works. As the generator reaches its peak, it produces sparks, lightning and makes hair stand up. The science techs stand inside the caged dome, which demonstrates lightning. Also, a 20 minute display teaches those in attendance about conductors, insulators, electricity, magnetism and storm safety.

The Dangers of Van de Graaff Generators

It is important to note that Van de Graaff machines, even the table top science lab units, can generate enough energy to stop a pacemaker and destroy sensitive electronic gadgets such as cell phones, laptops and personal computers. Make sure that during experimentation, precautions are taken to keep these devices away from the field of energy that is created by the generators. It is not recommended for children under the age of nine.
Static electricity is a threat that can cause many problems. A whole industry of static control equipment and materials has spawned from the ill effects of electrostatic fields and electrostatic discharge. If you have a static problem, please contact Static Clean and we will offer the best recommendations to keep you and your products safe.