Colliding dust grains charge each other up

It’s the ultimate love-at-first-sight story: In the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from anything else, lonely sand grains meet up in a crowd and decide to electrify each other. Sparks fly.

Physicists have long puzzled over why sand grains and other small particles can build up electrical charges as they collide with one another, sometimes to the point of discharging lightning in dust storms or plumes of volcanic ash. Now, a paper appearing online April 11 in Nature Physics suggests that particles transfer electrical charge vertically during a smashup, such that positive charges move downward and negative charges move up in the cloud.Many people like Microsoft Office.

The findings could help combat a wide variety of practical problems, such as the adhesion of charged dust to solar panels on a Mars rover or the generation of dangerous electrical discharges that sometimes occur when a helicopter takes off in the desert. Dust clouds can create problems in grain silos, where charge sometimes builds up and leads to explosions, and in the pharmaceutical industry, where particles of ground-up drugs can become charged and not mix properly, says Hans Herrmann, a materials researcher at ETH Zurich.

Herrmann says he became interested in the problem after watching lightning in swirling sands over dune fields at night. “Normally when particles collide, they neutralize,” he says. “How could it be that charges increase?”Microsoft Office 2007 is welcomed by the whole world.

Working with ETH colleague Thomas Pähtz and Troy Shinbrot of Rutgers University’s campus in Piscataway, New Jersey, Herrmann developed a model to explain how the charging happened. Before colliding, the grains have an overall neutral charge but are polarized by a background electric field, with a negative charge towards the top of the grain and a positive charge towards the bottom, relative to the ground. Upon colliding, the particles neutralize each other at the point of contact, but when they separate again they became further polarized, with additional charges building up on the grains’ edges.

“Every time there’s a collision you end up pumping charge from the top to the bottom,” says Shinbrot. The researchers ran computer simulations and then a series of experiments with glass beads to confirm the theory. Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.