ABSTRACT
The wide use of polymer fibres in textiles necessitates to study their electrification when they rubbing other surfaces. The electric static charge generated from the friction of different polymeric textiles sliding against cotton textiles, which used as a reference material, is discussed in the present work. Experiments were carried out to measure the electric static charge generated from the friction of different polymeric textiles sliding against cotton under varying sliding distance and velocity as well the load.
It was found that increasing the displacement up to 300 mm the voltage increased from - 5 V to - 25 V for 100 % polyester specimens The 100% spun polyester showed slight increase of the voltage by increasing displacement. Increase of cotton content decreased the generated voltage. Besides, as the load increased voltage generated from rubbing of 100 % spun polyester specimens increased, while increasing the load had no effect on the 100 % polyester as well as 100 % super max. polyester and the later one displays higher average voltage value compared to the other two polyester specimens.
Mixing polyester with rayon (viscose) showed the same behavior of mixing it with cotton except for 83 % fine polyester and 17 % super rayon which has completely different trend as the voltage decreased by increasing the load. It seems that fine fibres, of the two rubbed surfaces, charged by free electrons easily exchanged the electrons of dissimilar charges, where the resultant indicated relatively lower voltage.
Generally, increasing velocity increased the voltage. 100 % super max. polyester showed higher average voltage values than the other two types of polyester. The voltage increase with increasing velocity may be attributed to the increase of the mobility of the free electrons to one of the rubbed surfaces. The fineness of the fibres much influences the movement of the free electrons. The 80 % polyester, 17 % super rayon fabric specimens showed no effect of velocity on voltage that could be attributed to the use of high wet modulus rayon.