3M accidentally invents an electrostatic force field?

This occurred in late summer in South Carolina, in extremely high humidity. Polypropelene (PP) film on 50K ft. rolls 20ft wide was being slit and transferred to multiple smaller spools. The film was taken off the main roll at high speed, flowed upwards 20ft to overhead rollers, passed horizontally 20ft and then downwards to the slitting device, where it was spooled onto shorter rolls. The whole operation formed a cubical shaped tent, with two walls and a ceiling approximately 20ft square. The spools ran at 1000ft/min, or about 10MPH. The PP film had been manufactured with dissimilar surface structure on opposing faces. Contact electrification can occur even in similar materials if the surface textures or micro-structures are significantly different. The generation of a large imbalance of electrical surface-charge during unspooling was therefor not unexpected, and is a common problem in this industry. "Static cling" in the megavolt range!

On entering the factory floor and far from the equipment, Mr. Swenson's 200KV/ft handheld electrometer was found to slam to full scale. When he attempted to walk through the corridor formed by the moving film, he was stopped about half way through by an "invisible wall." He could lean all his weight forward but was unable to pass. He observed a fly get pulled into the charged, moving plastic, and speculates that the e-fields might have been strong enough to suck in birds!

source

would any "experts" like to comment or explain? is it possible to reproduce this effect on a larger or smaller scale?

id like to go there and experience it myself.

Why not, 3M's post-it was also an accident They where tring to make something else when they found the sticky stuff on the back.

3M also uses Industrial Intelligence Companys against competitors, interesting stuff.

Did he ever try and recreate the phenominon?
Or did he crash driving home that night and all work related to it were accidently destroyed lol.

I sense this may be BS. The reason being that creating a force field strong enough to repel a Human would require an enormous amount of power and would probably kill said Human as soon as He/She passes through the field bubble perimeter.

Of course that doesn't mean that this is BS. It's not unprecendented for us to invent something completely unexpectedly and not really understand how it works. The Telegraph is a good example of something that was invented before the phenomenon was understood.

[edit on 5-9-2005 by sardion2000]

We all know that very strong electrical fields can repel other charges. I'm not sure how this is inventing anything?

Originally posted by purelogik

...
On entering the factory floor and far from the equipment, Mr. Swenson's 200KV/ft handheld electrometer was found to slam to full scale. When he attempted to walk through the corridor formed by the moving film, he was stopped about half way through by an "invisible wall." He could lean all his weight forward but was unable to pass. He observed a fly get pulled into the charged, moving plastic, and speculates that the e-fields might have been strong enough to suck in birds!

...

The field exists between differently charged surfaces, so it must have been horizontal or vertical or a mixture of the two, in a plane perpendicular to the film (not in the direction of the corridor). So the field does not form a "wall" accross the corridor. There is therefore no reason why he should feel repulsive effects in the direction of walking. At most, he should feel an uncomfortable physical effect from the slow electrolysis induced in his body, and this would be the psychological "wall" that made him stop.
The repulsive or attractive force is given by F=q*E. For example, if he had a very large negative charge q and was walking towards the negative end of the field E, he would feel a repulsive force F. But the charge would have been so high that when he touched the ground or a metal surface afterwards he would be burned by electrocution, which the article doesn't mention.
Therefore -> bogus.

As always, someone has to mention the value for military purposes. Shielding tanks perhaps? or maybe a huge 200ft long "wall" protecting all the soldiers as they advanced???

Just wrap the tanks in the PP and put a few air pockets in it. Then you can just bounce things off it

But with the question,
It sounds like a load of rubbish for me, if the field was strong enough to do that, the sides would be flexing an increadble amount. The barrier also wouldn't that defined. The field strength would increase as he approached the pp corridor.

amasci.com/weird collects all kinds of these stories which are often of dubious origin and can't be verified.

I saw that story like 2 years ago but yes good post I wanted to re-find that story thanks

Originally posted by Simon666
amasci.com/weird collects all kinds of these stories which are often of dubious origin and can't be verified.

I was wondering why that site looked familiar lol

www.esdjournal.com...

And a discussion from another forum here.

www.advancedphysics.org...

Gravity wave & Rgclark from that forum give an excellent suggestion on how it could happen. Not really a force field, but a reaction. The dipolar alignment of the water molecules within the person that is subjected to those high electric fields.

Makes me wonder. Wouldn't the static repulsion cause the loss of coherence in the bonds between atoms in the human or whatever tries to pass the field?

Just from knowledge (never experience) loss of atomic coherence is bad

Suprised we don't have more news about the above phenomena considering it happened in 1980. Must of failed to be repeatable?

Here's another force field for you, but put to military use.

British 'force field' protects tanks
www.abovetopsecret.com...






[edit on 6-9-2005 by Regenmacher]

So, is this a refutable story or not?
I find it very interesting, the creation of a real Force field, as in a field of energy that does'nt allow things to pass through it, would be a great invention, and would have a very large market.

Sorry to bump this thread again.
But I would be interested, if anyone ever thought again about it, and came up with a possible reasonable explanation.

I definitely think the report is genuine, as it was an official report on the 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium.

Also on reddit much later some guy working for 3M said, he knows that machine. Although he only knows it from newer times, where they have already "fixed" the problem. But, he also said, although the problem has been fixed, the machine still produces huge amounts of electrostatic charge.

My thought on the whole would be, that it cannot be a force experienced directly by electrostatic charges.
Why? Well, do the math, and you will quickly see that it is impossible to get such strong charge imbalances to get such forces. The voltage would not have to be in the Megavolt range. Not even in the Gigavolt range, but much much higher. It is impossible to create such a high voltage, especially in air.

I think one can safely assume, that the voltage reached at most a few MV.

IMHO the electric environment could only have had an indirect effect.

This is why I personally think, the only possible explanation would be, that this rotation and charge imbalance somehow created certain air pressure differences. And that it was finally these pressure differences, which then created something resembling a wall. As even very small pressure differences already create strong forces.

But I would not know, how these pressure differences could have emerged...

Would really be interested, if anyone had some ideas, how this effect could be explained...