Hey everyone,

This is my first post here, please forgive me if it's in the wrong place.

Years ago I made this small app in C# for calculating the force, in Newtons, between two oppositely charged plates that can take various parameters. I've never truly believed the numbers it outputs as they just seem too high to me. I'm curious if anyone here knows a bit about electrostatics and the formulas I've used, and if you'd be kind enough to either verify the formulas or shed some light on where I might have gone wrong. Any thoughts are much appreciated.

Here's a screenshot of the app with some parameters filled in. I'm happy to send the application to anyone who wants to test it out.



Matt

 

I have had to deal with electro-static forces while removing plastic covers. The force can be fairly great because the voltages can be fairly high. So at small air gaps the force can be rather strong. The last time I saw the force equation was in my physics class 50 years ago, and I never used it in engineering. So not a lot of help.
BUT it is interesting and your application may be quite interesting to a number of us.

 

I posted this question elsewhere too and got this as one of the answers.
https://www-eng.lbl.gov/~shuman/XENON/REFERENCES&OTHER_MISC/electric_forces.pdf

I used the formula in this and got much more realistic results. I'm updating the app now. I'm happy to post the app somewhere if people might find it useful.