Polyethylene (PE) turf fibers are used in wide application such as kid gardens and sport yards. They offer durable and elastic behavior. The present work aims to investigate electrostatic charge (ESC) generated from contact and separation as well as sliding of three conducting materials such as aluminium (Al) film, copper (Cu) textile and carbon fibers (CF) on PE turf blended by polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) yarns and polyurethane (PU) fibers. The experimental results showed that Al film gained the highest ESC followed by Cu textile and CF. This observation confirms that the conductor of lower measured resistivity gains higher ESC. It was found that as the content of PMMA or PU increased, ESC decreased then became negative when PMMA yarns content was triple the content of PE fibers. In addition to that, it was observed that the intensity of ESC measured for the tested conductors is very low compared to that measured for the tested fibers. It seems that ESC generated on the conductor quickly moved from the surface into the depth. Because electrons accumulate on the peaks of the surface asperities in form of isolated islands, the role of conductive counterface is to collect them and uniformly distribute on the contact area. Besides, some of the electrons moved to the conductor and consequently the intensity of ESC decreased on the polymer surface. Finally, the blending process showed significant enhancement where ESC drastically decreased with increasing PMMA yarns and PU fibers.
Ali et al. (2020) studied this question.