Guns and Nozzles

Posted on by Jim Patterson

I see my life in terms of music

Being a big music enthusiast, running jam sessions in the barn behind our house and working in the static business always has me thinking of cool names to call our jam band.   The band is made up of four people from our company, Static Clean International and other invited guests. Then it hit me, we will call our band “Guns and Nozzles”.

In our lineup of static control products, some of the key tools to deal with static electricity and particle contamination problems are ionizing air guns and ionizing air nozzles.

Simply stated, they use compressed air or nitrogen to blow off debris and the ionizing components inside of the units make sure that the particles are not reattached back onto the newly cleaned substrate. The latest edition to the ionizing air tools is the Zapp Plus, which features a controller, a sensor eye, a goose-neck for flexibility, a built-in piezoelectric transformer and a fault detector to warn of power supply problems.

Without deviation progress is not possible-Frank Zappa

The Zapp Plus has gained wide acceptance for use with our Particle Trap® 6000, a source capture systems that collects the particles once removed from optics, medical devices, thermoformed trays and any product that requires cleanliness. The Particle Trap® 6000 was developed with a guy named Frank and as corny as it sounds, we’ve thought about calling the product the Frank Zappa. Of course that was never really going to happen, but who can argue with genius of the real Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Guns and nozzles

Call Me Crazy!

Posted on by Robert Phillips

How many ways can you call someone crazy?   “What are you nuts, kooky, mad, silly, wacky, ape, psycho, bonkers, cracked, delirious, berserk, daft, demented or deranged and I really like fruity and out to lunch”?    While the Oxford Dictionary describes it as a noun meaning: Mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way, we really don’t have the same intent when using crazy in conversation with friends and family.

The opposite to crazy is, calm, collected, rational, responsible, realistic, reasonable, sound and balanced. Can we be honest and agree that most of the time we are somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.   Nobody can be totally calm, always rational, completely realistic, always responsible or perfectly balanced, but a happy medium makes life more interesting.   Wouldn’t you agree?

When it comes to ionization, especially in electronics manufacturing, the goal is towards perfectly balanced static eliminators. There is no room for an ionizer to be out of balance or to produce more positive than negative ions. Such a state of imbalance can cause early failure of electronics boards or assemblies or create a situation called “walking wounded”.   This simply means that harm has been done in the form of static electricity discharge (esd) to the device that may cause a latent product failure.   It could be a TV, stereo or any electronics widget that uses sensitive electronics components in it design that is impacted by the esd event. Many Static Clean ionizers such as our Sentinel Blower meet or exceeds the ESD standard for balance.

In life it is also good to strike a happy balance. Call me crazy, but then again aren’t we all?

The World Unites in Support of Danny Nickerson

Posted on by Jim Patterson

July 25, 2014 marks the date of 6-year-old Danny Nickerson, of Foxboro Massachusetts’, birthday. Danny is a 6-year old with an inoperable brain tumor. His only wish this year was to receive birthday cards on his special day. The Huffington Post wrote an article about Danny & it went viral. Random people, strangers actually, have displayed ‘random’ acts of kindness towards Danny and his wishes. How? They sent him snail mail. Each and every day Danny would go to the PO Box that his parents set up for him & was astonished by the overwhelming flood of mail & love received by complete strangers from all over the world; California, Alaska, Australia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Norway & Sweden to name a few. Static Clean International, Inc. of Burlington, MA was one of those strangers. Danny has received over 15,000 snail mail birthday cards and still counting.

Word reached Patriots owner, Bob Kraft and he invited Danny and his family to the Patriots training camp this past Friday.  The team had a few surprises up their sleeves including all getting together at midfield to sing Danny happy birthday and present him with a very large birthday card signed by all the players.  Danny who is quite shy, sat there grinning from ear to ear as the Pats sang “Happy Birthday”.  It was a truly special moment for him and his family.

You’re probably wondering what snail mail for Danny and static have in common, right? Have you ever opened snail mail or an envelope or pulled sticky tape off of a surface and seen a flash of light? There is a name for this – triboluminescence; or in other words – a piezoelectric effect. When piezoelectric materials, like sticky or self-adhesive envelopes, are stretched – they generate electricity. When you rip an envelope open – the distribution of positive and negative charges across the envelope may become uneven. When the charges clump in one area – and are either highly positive or highly negative – and you continue to rip open the envelope, the electricity ignites the atoms in the glue & the energy created is released as light.

Not many people would try and solve a static on snail mail problem. However, if you were trying to control the piezoelectric effect from occurring – you may considering our Piezonizer ZAPP II nozzle. It’s a compact AC ionizer with an ultra-small built-in piezoelectric transformer. The excellent ion balance and fast static decay rates make this the ideal choice nozzle to reduce static elimination when space is at a premium.

Sources: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=894.0

Written by: Julianne Patterson – julianne@staticclean.com

Ions for Health

Posted on by Jim Patterson

I received a call back in 1985 from a guy in South Dakota looking to buy an ion for his brother. I told him that you couldn’t buy just one ion, but that we have ionizers that produce millions of ions. He went on to say that his brother owns a bar and that the Board of Health was going to shut him down unless he put in an ionizer system to eat the smoke in a dungeon of a bar that had a low ceiling.

Even though warning labels appeared on cigarette packs back in the late 1960’s, it wasn’t until around 1985 that the understanding of the harm caused by secondhand smoke started to catch on. In 2000, states started taking measures to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. In fact, in 2002 Delaware was the first state to ban smoking in restaurants, bars and the workplace.

So what about our friend from South Dakota?

Besides the fact that the bar was like a dungeon with low ceilings, it had an inadequate heating, ventilation and cooling systems (HVAC). Even back in the 1980’s, people realized that ions help in the fight against not only smoke, but also odors and other airborne contaminants that impact health.

Today, ionization is a standard tool in the fight to improving indoor air quality. Ionizers are used in many gambling casinos where smoking is allowed. Ionizers are used not only to keep the cooling coils clean on the upstream side of the HVAC systems, but on the downstream side where air enters the gambling halls. The goal is to keep the players healthy.

Hospitals use ionization to fight outside diesel fuel that may enter through the air systems. Gymnasiums use them as a tool to fight odors just as nail salons do to rid the smell of noxious nail polish remover.

For years, boutique stores in major malls have sold single polarity, negative ion generators that claim to have health benefits. There were many who had their doubts about these products. Now, bi-polar ionizers are used in globally renowned institutions with the confidence that it really improves our everyday lives.

You can visit our site to see the Ionizing Blowers that we can provide for your business, whether it is for a casino or a smoking bar.

A Hair-Raising Experience

Posted on by Jim Patterson

“I can’t get the static out of my hair!”

Ladies, you know what we’re talking about. Those of you with long hair (and gentlemen, too) are probably all too familiar with static electricity styling your hair. Combining the dry winter months that have relatively low humidity with blow dryer use is the main reason for flyaway hair that looks like it comes from a science experiment.

You’ve heard of the home remedies; leave your hair damp, add some high quality conditioner or take more Omega Fatty Acids such as fish oil.  While these solutions are not too far off base, let’s look at the root cause of the problem first.

Where does static electricity come from?

Everything is made up of atoms. Most atoms are neutral because the positive charges cancel out of the negative charges. When the outer layer of atoms is rubbed off, it will produce atoms that have a slightly positive charge while the object that did the rubbing will have a slightly negative charge. Static electricity is caused by two materials, one that charges positively and one that charges negatively.

Static electricity in your hair or on your clothing is no different than the static that is generated during many manufacturing processes. Brushing your hair with plastic bristles creates the same problem as plastic material rubbing against machine parts: unwanted static. While controlling static can mean the difference between a good or bad hair day for you, plastic manufacturers have a whole other set of problems. Controlling static makes a difference in how fast a machine can run, how to prevent shocks and how to improve yields, which translates into higher profits for the company.

So what’s the static solution?

You might have thought that raising the humidity could fix your hair problem. True, the static might go away, but your hair will be a frizzy mess instead. In the manufacturing world, it can cause extreme problems such as rust on metal machine parts. In the hair care world, some of the major hair dryer manufacturers have added ionic blow dryers to their product lines. These ionic dryers create positive and negative ions to help fight out static electricity.

The best way to ensure that equipment runs smoothly and static-free in any manufacturing process is to use the right ionizer in the form of blowers, static bars, air knives or nozzles. Serving industrial, medical and electronic markets, we have the solution to your static problem…contact us today!