Is Regular Rubber Antistatic – Or Not?

Hi, I’m Dave Long, president of StaticWorx. Today is day 30 in the lockdown. It’s April 15th. And what I’ve decided to talk about today is the difference between the static-dissipative and charged-generation properties of regular rubber flooring andconductive rubber flooring.

If you’ll notice, the back of this one is black. That’s because it has carbon in it. This is regular rubber. There’s no carbon in it. What we’ve done is we’ve set up a copper strip which is attached to ground. It goes all the way to this electrical outlet, which is exactly the same way you would ground a floor in a data center, in server room, in a flight tower, in an electronics manufacturing area. So, as long as these flooring materials have the ability to be grounded, they will be grounded via this copper.

So what we’re going to do for an experiment is we’re going to take this static meter, which measures the static field on other materials, and I’ll explain it real quickly. If the needle’s in the center, that means there’s no static charge. If it moves to the right, there’s a positive charge. If it moves to the left, there’s a negative charge. By the way, if it moves to the extreme end of either side, that’s about 5,000 volts of static electricity. It takes less than 100 volts to damage electronic circuits. This metal disc is insulated from me by this plastic handle. That’s going to allow me to rub the disc on these two floors and find out if it can hold a charge.

So let’s take the disc, and we’re going to rub it on regular rubber floor. And as you can see, I have pegged the meter. That means that I’ve got at least 5,000 volts of static electricity on this disc. Now watch what happens when I press it on the copper. I’ve discharged it. There’s no more static on there. Now I’m going to take the disc, and I’m going to rub it on the conductive rubber floor that has the black back. Same thing I just did over there. And I don’t have any static electricity.

So the only thing I’ve shown you so far is that this floor won’t generate static electricity. This one will. I’m going to show you one more thing. I can take the charge that this floor generates, and I can put it over here and get rid of it. I take the charge. I try to get rid of it here. It’s still there. If I touch the copper, I can also get rid of it. So, this floor, just like copper, has the ability to not only prevent static electricity but to also dissipate it when static is generated, and it comes in contact with the floor. So it’s quite simple. If you’re looking to prevent static in any of the applications where it’s mandatory to control, like a 9-1-1 call center, server room, flight tower, you can’t use regular rubber flooring. You have to use conductive rubber.

That’s it for today. I hope the concept made sense to you. Call me if you have any questions. Thank you.