What is it about?
Many items of interest to environmental science - insects, snowflakes, sand and dust - carry small electric charges which may influence their behaviour. A convenient method is needed to measure the charge in environmental fieldwork, and our miniature Faraday cup design allows this, by collecting the charge on an object dropped into it. A novel aspect of our device is that it contains the sensitive electronics needed, and we have devised methods to calibrate it without recourse to laboratory grade equipment.
Featured Image
Photo by Abhidev Vaishnav on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Small electric charges are exploited by spiders, bees and moths, and influence the collection of dust particles and the rate of fog droplet evaporation. Such small quantities of charge are much more difficult to measure in the real world environment than in the lab, and our integrated Faraday cup is intended to make it easier, opening up new applications in environmental science.
Perspectives
Could we make a Faraday cup charge collector that contained all the electronics needed to make environmental charge measurements easier? We have shown we can. We also found that the cup collector works well with an ultrasonic levitator, allowing us to keep an object suspended and away from anything it could discharge to, before releasing it into the Faraday cup for measurements.
Professor Giles Harrison
University of Reading
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Faraday cup for charge measurements in biophysical and environmental fieldwork, Journal of Electrostatics, June 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.elstat.2025.104062.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
