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ANTEC '97 Conference Proceedings, CRC Press, pages 1310-1313.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/SPE_ANTEC_1997_Proceedi...
The thread is based on a conference talk and journal publication that preceded it.
The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application, requires a lot of equipment, requires the equipment to be intentionally improperly operated risking damage or injury, and it's extremely expensive to test.
Nobody is going to willingly tool up an environment capable of running a mile of 20 foot wide PP film at a thousand feet per minute, then purposely ungrounding the equipment, and run it at 100+ F and 95+ % humidity for hours, days, or weeks. Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
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Ah. Nice to have a solid reference.
It's not an unusual problem. Anything which moves thin sheets of insulating material at high speed can cause this. And so, there are standard devices for dealing with it.
The simplest is copper tinsel. That's even available at WalMart.[1] There are fancier systems. [2] The static eliminator doesn't have to touch the product. Close is good enough. Maybe 1 inch for tinsel, much greater for the active devices.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/search?q=anti-static+tinsel
[2] https://www.takk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-TAKK-ca...
According to https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_index, 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F. The linked paper says "temperature often approached 100 F with relative humidity above 95%," and later references specific conditions of 92 F and 95% RH (137 F heat index).
Are these sorts of heat index values feasible for a plant environment? The line about 100/95 seems almost hyperbolic, which doesn't help with credibility in my opinion. Maybe I'm missing something.
We could design the experiment. Then try to reduce the experiment to a cheap, convenient form.
Surely somebody has done at least that.
There are much easier and cheaper ways of generating megavolts of electricity, I think the biggest barrier would be getting someone who knows enough about this to build it despite their skepticism about the validity of it.
> The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application
It can be a tourist attraction you sell tickets to.
> Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
You're a couple orders of magnitude too high.
Polypropylene film isn't that expensive. A thousand feet per minute is only 10 miles per hour, which is not that fast at all. Humidity and heat aren't hard to generate in a closed space.
This is the kind of thing that's within the budget of some ambitious YouTubers, not millions of dollars.
It's a fun urban legend. The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
It's a fun urban legend. Leave it be, but don't take it seriously.