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Electrostatic discharge while fueling with gasoline is a present danger at gas stations. [24] Fires have also been started at airports while refueling aircraft with kerosene. New grounding technologies, the use of conducting materials, and the addition of anti-static additives help to prevent or safely dissipate the buildup of static electricity.
Electrostatics is a branch of physics that studies slow-moving or stationary electric charges. Since classical times , it has been known that some materials, such as amber , attract lightweight particles after rubbing .
In 1746–1748, Benjamin Franklin experimented with charging Leyden jars in series, [23] and developed a system involving 11 panes of glass with thin lead plates glued on each side, and then connected together. He used the term "electrical battery" to describe his electrostatic battery in a 1749 letter about his electrical research in 1748.
In classical electrostatics, the electrostatic field is a vector quantity expressed as the gradient of the electrostatic potential, which is a scalar quantity denoted by V or occasionally φ, [1] equal to the electric potential energy of any charged particle at any location (measured in joules) divided by the charge of that particle (measured ...
The Kelvin water dropper, invented by Scottish scientist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1867, [1] is a type of electrostatic generator. Kelvin referred to the device as his water-dropping condenser. The apparatus is variously called the Kelvin hydroelectric generator, the Kelvin electrostatic generator, or Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm.
There is also an analogous theorem in electrostatics, known as Green's reciprocity, relating the interchange of electric potential and electric charge density. Forms of the reciprocity theorems are used in many electromagnetic applications, such as analyzing electrical networks and antenna systems. [ 1 ]
Therefore electrostatic induction ensures that the electric field everywhere inside a conductive object is zero. A remaining question is how large the induced charges are. The movement of charges is caused by the force exerted on them by the electric field of the external charged object, by Coulomb's law .
Earnshaw's theorem states that a collection of point charges cannot be maintained in a stable stationary equilibrium configuration solely by the electrostatic interaction of the charges. This was first proven by British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw in 1842. It is usually cited in reference to magnetic fields, but was first applied to ...