Anti-Static Properties of Materials

Testing, measurement and control of anti-static properties in materials.

Intertek helps clients to understand the anti-static properties of materials. Such knowledge is crucial in many applications, where the build up of static charges can lead to hazardous or problematic electrical discharges.

The ability of a material to discharge, and thus damaging electrical charges is affected by the purity of the material, level of contamination, moisture content, physical form (including surface roughness) and other factors. For mission critical applications, it is important to carry out a proper evaluation of these static properties, rather than relying entirely on just theoretical materials properties.

Intertek provides test methods to assess anti-static properties of materials. Measurements are typically made on solid substances.

Static properties test measurements:

• Volume Resistivity is a measurement of the bulk electrical properties of the material, but is not a particularly good indicator of antistatic performance, which can be dominated by surface effects or inhomogeneous contamination
• Surface Resistivity is more generally used to assess antistatic properties, but results can still sometime be misleading - for example if a relatively conductive sheet of polymer has a thin insulating surface layer.
• Packaging materials for electronic components
• Polymer film manufacturing problems
• Polymer film and sheet handling problems (sticking & binding)
• Powder handling and ignition analysis