ESD plastics

No new standards I’m aware of regarding static dissipative levels of production equipment. It becomes an issue in environments with explosion risk: volatiles, dusts. Or where the process itself is susceptible to static buildup such as paper handling and some dry foods processing.

Just about all plastics are susceptible to static surface charge buildup, just the action of airflow over the plastic surface, over time, is enough to build up a charge, so is the mundane action of removing a plastic housing device from a foam cushioning travel case enough to actually cause a static discharge spark.

Plastics material conductive fillers do not work well, regardless of specification or whatever people tell you. Sure, there’s conductive plastics and carbon and metal fillers, but they don’t work well and they don’t work for long. Bulk fillers are processed to not migrate to the surface of plastic parts during molding as most bulk fillers are ugly and quite noticeable on the surface. As static electricity is a surface charge, intentionally processing conductive fill away from the surface inherently makes so called conductive plastics not good at ESD. Frustratingly, a conductive fill actually can work but it’s very inconsistent as the fill dispersion is not homogenous and different part to part: stab electrical test leads into a conductive filled plastic part at different points and you’ll get dramatically different resistivity readings.

So, I designed several lines of portable gas detectors, all requiring electrical safety certification for explosive environments. For the highest safety rating, the only solution for surface ESD was a conductive carbon spray. It turned the nice surface texture molded plastic housings into what looked like a too heavy paint job. To be clear, the devices, with carbon spray coatings, were tested at safety certification laboratories both in US and EU, so there are standards, but they’re a bit usage location specific.

However, Xerox and competitors face this issue in photocopiers, as described to me by one of their engineers. I don’t know exact details of how they do it, but it appears they use lots of ground return cables and small brushes to constantly drain charge?