Coulomb Basics

Coulomb's Law is one of the basic ideas of electricity in physics.

The law looks at the forces created between two charged
objects. As distance increases, the forces and electric fields
decrease. This simple idea was converted into a relatively
simple formula. The force between the objects can be positive
or negative depending on whether the objects are attracted to
each other or repelled. 

Think about a few concepts

before you continue reading.
Some charges are attracted
to each other. Positive and
negative charges like to
move towards each other.
Similar charges such as two
positive or two negative push
away from each other. You
also need to understand that
forces between objects
become stronger as they
move together and weaker as they move apart. You could yell
at someone from far away, and they would barely hear you. If
you yelled the same amount when you were together, it would
be more powerful and loud. 

Coulomb's Work
Charles Augustin de Coulomb was a French scientist
working in the late 1700's. A little earlier, a British scientist
named Henry Cavendish came up with similar ideas. Coulomb
received most of the credit for the work on electric forces
because Cavendish did not publish all of his work. The world
never knew about Cavendish's work until decades after he
died. 
 Coulomb's Law
But you're here to learn
about the law. When you
have two charged
particles, an electric
force is created. If you have
larger charges, the forces will
be larger. If you use those
two ideas, and add the fact
that charges can attract and
repel each other you will
understand Coulomb's Law.
It's a formula that measures
the electrical forces between two objects.
F=kq1q2/r2

"F" is the resulting force between the two charges. The

distance between the two charges is "r." The "r" actually stands
for "radius of separation" but you just need to know it is a
distance. The "q1" and "q2" are values for the amount of
charge in each of the particles. Scientists use Coulombs as
units to measure charge. The constant of the equation is "k."
As you learn more physics, you will see that this formula is
very similar to a formula from Newton's work with gravity. 

Static electricity



  

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: December 1, 2016.

Z ap! When a bolt of lightning leaps to the ground, we get a sudden,

very vivid demonstration of the power of static

electricity (electrical energy that has gathered in one place). Most of us know
that static builds up when we rub things together, although that's not really a
satisfying explanation. What is it about rubbing things that produces an
electrical phenomenon? Although lightning is a spectacular example of static
electricity, it's not something we can harness. But there are many other places
where static electricity is incredibly useful; from laser
printers and photocopiers to pollution-busting power plants, static can be
really fantastic. So let's take a closer look at what it is and how it works!
Photo: A lightning bolt is a huge release of static electricity, in which built-up electrical potential energy shoots
from the sky to the ground in a sudden, improvised, electric current. Picture by David Parsons courtesy of US
DOE/NREL (Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory).

What is static electricity?

Photo: Classic static: When you rub a balloon on your pullover, you create static electricity that makes it stick.
The rubbing shifts electrons from your pullover (which becomes positively charged) to the latex rubber in the
balloon (which becomes negatively charged). The opposite charges make the two things stick.
We take electricity for granted: it's easy to forget that homes, offices, and
factories have been powered in this clean and convenient way only since the
end of the 19th century—which, in the broader run of human history, is no
time at all. It was during the 19th century that pioneers such as Alessandro
Volta, Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, and Thomas Edisonfigured out the
secrets of electricity, how to produce it, and how to make it do useful things. 
Before that, electricity was largely a curiosity: it was very interesting for
scientists to study and play with, but there wasn't much else they could do
with it. In those days, people cooked and heated their homes using wood or
coal stoves and lit their rooms with candles or oil lamps; there were no such
things as radios or TVs, much less cellphones or computers.

The "modern electricity" that powers everything from the phone in your pocket
to the subway you ride to school or work is what we call current
electricity (or electric current). It's energy that travels down a metal wire from
the place where it's produced (anything from a gigantic power plant to a
tiny battery) to the thing it powers (often an electric motor, heating element,
or lamp). Current electricity is always on the move, carrying energy from one
place to another.

Photo: Current electricity: When electricity flows around a closed loop, called a circuit, we can use it to
transport energy from a source (in this case, an electricity outlet on the wall) so it does something useful (in this
case, warming the heating elements on an electric fire).

Before the 19th century, the only kind of electricity people really knew about or
tried to use was static electricity. The ancient Greeks understood that things
could be given a static electric "charge" (a buildup of static) simply by rubbing
them, but they had no idea that the same energy could be used to
generate light or power machines. One of the people who helped to make the
connection between static and current electricity was American statesman,
publisher, and scientist Benjamin Franklin. In 1752, when Franklin tried to
figure out the mysteries of electricity, he famously did so by flying a kite in a
thunderstorm to catch himself some electrical energy (an extremely
dangerous thing to do). A lightning bolt zapped down the kite to the ground
and, had Franklin not been insulated, he might well have been killed. Franklin
realized that static electricity, accumulating in the sky, became current
electricity when a lightning bolt carried it down to the surface of the Earth. It
was through research such as this that he developed one of his most
famous inventions, the lightning rod (lightning conductor). Franklin's work
paved the way for the electrical revolution of the 19th century—and the world
really changed when people such as Volta and Faraday, building on Franklin's
discoveries, learned how to produce electricity at will and make it do useful
things.

Potential and kinetic energy

Just quickly, in passing, it's worth noting that there's another way to think of
static and current electricity and to relate them to things we already know
about energy. We can think of static electricity as a kind of potential energy:
it's stored energy ready and waiting to do something useful for us. In a similar
way, current electricity is (loosely speaking) analogous to kinetic energy:
energy in movement—albeit of an electrical kind. Just as you can turn
potential energy into kinetic energy (for example, by letting a bolder roll down
a hill), so you can turn static electricity into current electricity (that's what a
lightning bolt does) and back again (that's how a Van de Graaff
generator works).

What makes static electricity?

Until a few years ago, scientists were confident that they understood static
electricity and exactly how it worked. The explanation went like this...

Just like the ancient Greeks, we tend to think static electricity comes
from rubbing things. So if you live in a home with nylon carpets and metal
doorknobs, you'll soon learn that your body builds up a static charge when you
walk across the floor, which can discharge when you touch a doorknob, giving
you a tiny electric shock. In most school experiments, we also learn about
static by rubbing things. You've probably tried that trick where you rub a
balloon on your clothes to make it stick? You might conclude from this that
static electricity is somehow connected to friction—that it's the very act of
rubbing something vigorously that produces a buildup of electrical energy (in
the same way that friction can produce heat and even fire).
The triboelectric effect

It's not the rubbing that's important but the fact that we're bringing two different
materials into contact. Rubbing two things together vigorously simply brings
them into contact again and again—and it's this that produces the static
electricity through a phenomenon known as triboelectricity (or the
triboelectric effect). All materials are built from atoms, which have a positive
central core (the nucleus) surrounded by a kind of fuzzy "cloud" of electrons,
which are the really exciting bits. Now some atoms have a more powerful pull
on electrons than others; a great deal of chemistry stems from that fact. If we
put two different materials in contact, and one attracts electrons more than the
other, it's possible for electrons to be pulled from one of the materials to the
other. When we separate the materials, the electrons effectively jump ship to
the material that attracts them most strongly. As a result, one of the materials
has gained some extra electrons (and becomes negatively charged) while the
other material has lost some electrons (and becomes positively charged). Hey
presto, we have static electricity! When we rub things together again and
again, we increase the chances that more atoms will take part in this electron-
swap, and that's why a static charge builds up.

Photo: How the triboelectric effect explains static electricity: 1. Ebonite (hard vulcanized rubber—shown here
as a black rod) and wool (shown as gray) normally have no electric charge. 2) Put them in contact and the
ebonite attracts electrons from the wool. 3) Separate them and the electrons remain on the ebonite, making it
negatively charged and leaving the wool with a lack of electrons (or a positive charge). Rubbing the two
substances together increases the contact between them and makes it more likely that electrons will migrate
from the wool to the ebonite. The negative charge on the ebonite is exactly the same size as the positive
charge on the wool; in other words, no net charge is created.

The triboelectric series

If you experiment with different materials, you find some gain positive charges
when they're rubbed and some gain negative charges; some materials also
gain more charge than others. It turns out that we can rank materials in order
according to the charge they gain, giving us a kind of league table of materials
running from positive to negative. Different books and web pages show
slightly different lists, but they all broadly run from minerals (positive) through
such things as wood and paper (neutral) to plastics (negative). Don't worry too
much about the exact order of the list; it's going to vary for all kinds of reasons
(the kind of glass or the additives in the latex, for example).

++++++++ POSITIVE ++++++++

+ Air
+ Skin
+ Leather
+ Asbestos
+ Glass
+ Mica
+ Quartz
+ Nylon
+ Wool
+ Fur
+ Lead
+ Silk
+ Aluminum
0 Paper
0 Cotton
0 Steel
0 Wood
− Amber
− Latex
− Hard rubber
− Nickel
− Copper
− Brass
− Silver
− Gold
− Platinum
− Polyester
− Polystyrene
− Neoprene
− Saran ("cling film")
− Polyethylene
 − Polypropylene
− Polyvinylchloride (PVC)
− Selenium
− Teflon
− Silicone rubber
− Ebonite (very hard vulcanized rubber)

−−−−−−−−NEGATIVE−−−−−−−−

This list is called the triboelectric series. The further apart two materials are
in the series, the more static electricity will build up when you rub them
together. If two materials are very close in the series, it's hard to get them to
build up any charge at all no matter how hard you rub them. That would seem
to confirm that static electricity isn't about rubbing, per se, but about the nature
of the materials we bring into contact.

Rethinking static electricity

What you've just read is the traditional, widely accepted explanation of static
electricity—and you'll still find it described that way in most school books.

But in 2011, scientists reported some important new discoveries that seemed
to suggest much more was going on. Instead of being purely a matter of
physics, and a simple transfer of charged electrons from one material to
another, it seemed static electricity could also be caused
by chemistry (movement of ions and other essentially chemical processes).
And it could also happen through a swapping of small amounts of actual
material (a bit of balloon shifting to your pullover or vice versa). Where we
used to think of static as a simple "pile" of negative or positive charge
(electrons or a lack of them), on closer inspection, it now appears to be a
"mosaic" of both positive and negative charges that add up to an overall
charge (positive or negative). This research is very new, and still evolving, but
it seems clear that our traditional explanation of static electricity is an
oversimplified version of what's really happening, even if we've faithfully
believed it for over 2000 years!
Artwork: Top: The traditional theory sees a static charge on a balloon as an even spread of charged particles
across its surface. Bottom: According to the latest thinking, a static charge is actually a random "mosaic" of
much bigger charges, which can be both positive and negative, and which add up to an overall charge. In this
case, there's much more negative charge than positive (yellow than red), so our balloon has an overall
negative charge.

Further reading

Simple introductions

 What You Learned About Static Electricity Is Wrong by John Timmer.

Wired, June 25, 2011.
 A Shocking New Understanding of Static Electricity by Douglas Main.
Popular Mechanics, June 29, 2011.

More complex articles

 The Mosaic of Surface Charge in Contact Electrification by H. T.

Baytekin, A. Z. Patashinski, M. Branicki, B. Baytekin, S. Soh, and B. A.
Grzybowski. Science, July 15, 2011, Vol. 333, Issue 6040, pp.308–312.
 Antioxidants dispel static electricity by Richard Van Noorden. Nature,
September 19, 2013.
 What Creates Static Electricity? by Meurig W. Williams. American
Scientist, Volume 100, July/August 2012, pp.316–323.
What use is static electricity?

Now static electricity is all very interesting, but what possible use is it? You
can't make toast from a lightning bolt and you can't charge your cellphone
simply by rubbing its case on your pullover. You might think static is one of
those fascinating but ultimately quite useless bits of science that has no
practical applications—but you'd be wrong: static electricity is used in all kinds
of everyday technology!

Laser printers and photocopiers use static electricity to build up ink on a drum

and transfer it to paper. Crop spraying also relies on static electricity to help
herbicides stick to the foliage of plants and distribute themselves evenly over
the leaves. Factory paint-spraying robots use a similar trick to ensure that
paint droplets are attracted to metal car bodies and not the machinery around
them. In many power plants and chemical factories, static electricity is used in
smokestacks to scrub away pollution (read more in our article on electrostatic
smoke precipitators).

Photo: How can you stop air pollution  spewing out from smokestacks? One way is to give a static electric
charge to smoke, then funnel it through a grid of metal plates with an opposite charge, so the dirty soot
particles are removed. That's how "scrubbers" (electrostatic smoke precipitators) work, such as the ones
installed in these smokestacks at the McNeil biomass power plant in Burlington, VT. Photo by Warren Gretz
courtesy of  US DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Of course, static electricity has its drawbacks too. It can cause sparks and
explosions in fuel depots and stray static is a real nuisance if you're working
with electronic components. That's why engineers and chemists have
developed all kinds of anti-static technologies (from simple wires to ingenious,
slightly conducting paints and coatings) that prevent static buildup in sensitive
places. While you're reading these words, you can be sure that someone,
somewhere is trying to find a new way to harness static electricity or a better
way to stop it causing problems. Static electricity may be stationary, but it's
never standing still!