steam battery / steam battery / steam battery

Most semiconductor components are vulnerable to static electricity, also referred to as electrostatic discharge (ESD). These components are usually packaged with a piece of black, electrically conductive foam (referred to hereafter as “ESD foam”) placed over their electrical leads as a form of protection from ESD. Because ESD foam has a large internal surface area within a relatively small volume, it is plausible to assume that certain changes in the environment surrounding a sample of ESD foam might cause observable changes in the electrical resistance of the sample.

Initial investigations revealed that a sudden change in humidity from my breath did indeed result in a change in resistance for several ESD foam samples. However, the resistance readings appeared erratic and occasionally read as negative on the digital multimeter (DMM) used for the measurements. I soon found that the ESD foam samples were producing a DC voltage, which led to the formulation of a new hypothesis and experiment to address the means by which humidity could be generating the observed DC voltage in an apparently uniform ESD foam sample. Specifically, the experiment was designed to determine whether the DC voltage in the ESD foam settles into a steady state with the continuous localized application of humid air. It was also designed to determine the relationship between the polarity of the DC voltage across the sample and the relative position of the region on the sample directly exposed to the high-humidity airflow.