Experimental Demonstration and Quantification of Electrostatic Lofting of Dust Clumps

A PCO Dimax CS3 was used to take high-speed images at 945 frames per second of electrostatically lofted clumps of zirconia-silica microspheres. The images were processed and analyzed in Matlab using Matlab built-in functions. The two-dimensional centroid positions of lofted objects of interest were identified and their trajectories were tracked. The velocity and accelerations of tracked objects were then numerically calculated in order to solve for the cohesion, and compared to other independent methods.