Sunday, March 11, 2012

Why We Have Static in Our Body?

This few months I always get static on whatever I touched. I just don’t know when and where I’ll get shocked. But I’ll get shocked mostly in the office where I touch metal, monitor, door, and the most annoying one was when I touch my colleague. This happen not just once, it happen mostly all the time I have contact with them – the contact I mean was when I tap their shoulder or arm and or sometimes we bumped with each other while walking. I always blame them for giving me the static, though I know that I am the one giving out the shock. This makes me to avoid any contact with them and when I really need to tap their shoulder I will make a touch & go first before really rest my hand on it (no negativity here, it is just the culture – I’m not gay or pervert).

Do bare in mind that static is everywhere, but your surrounding plays an important role too – under right condition it generates easily. I remember that there are people reported to have burst the electrical appliances in their house because of static sparks, there are people whom have said to have switch of the PC & street light just by walking through it, and there are cases that people ignite the petrol pump through static and causes it to burst into fire, there may be more that I don’t know about it.  As I google for info, I’ve found some reason which I find quite true and related to the environment in my office. Some of the reason includes

Shoes - Simply walking across certain rugs or plastic flooring will cause your shoe soles to touch the dissimilar material of the rug. This is enough to separate the negatives from the positives and create imbalanced electric charges on the bottoms of your shoes. Remember that everything is made of atoms, and atoms in turn are made of positive and negative electric charges. In other words, your body is just a collection of positive and negative electrical particles. Normally the positives cancel out the negatives, and everything behaves electrically "neutral." No mysterious sparking. But if you ever end up with more negative than positive, or with more positive than negative, then you have a charge-imbalance on your body. You will get zapped the next time you touch a large metal object. Exactly how can this imbalance occur? Whenever we walk, the soles of our shoes steal some negative charge from the floor. We leave behind electrified positive footprints, and our bodies’ acquire an overall imbalance of negatives. After many footsteps, our bodies attain a high level of electric charge and a high voltage.

Walking forms – walking in a certain ways like Shuffling and dragging one’s feet will increase electrostatic buildup.

Humidity - The lower the humidity, the better the conditions are for static generation. The sparking condition normally happened in the lower humidity location such as air conditioning office buildings where air conditioning is needed for ventilation. Raising the humidity will stop the sparking.

Dry Skin - unusual dry skin will be one of the reasons for causing static spark.

Are there any cure?
There are basically no cure to it because it is not a disease or virus;). It does have some prevention method to it like;
     1. Changing your shoe to another type like ESD shoes.
           2. Using humidifier to raise humidity in the room. For my case, my office room air cond    
               can be turn on and off whenever we wanted. This applies to those office rooms that 
               do not have the privileges.
     3. Walk in a proper form, where your sole shoe does not drag the floor.
     4. Spraying carpets, floors, and chairs with an antistatic coating.
     5. When going out cars remember to grab the metal car door to discharge.
     6. Wearing a carbon fiber tuft bracelet.

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