Airport Security May be Harmful to Your Computer
By Steve Fowler
ESD Damage Lurks in Airport Security
The increase in security at airports after September
11th has also increased the possibility of ESD damage to electronic components. All laptop computers and most electronic
devices such as cell phones are required to be placed in a plastic tray to be X-rayed. These trays are
insulative and pose a real ESD threat to these devices.
During security checks, these trays are run on the X-ray conveyor
belt, nested together for return to the front of the security check point, un-nested by the next person
in line, the electronic devices are loaded into the tray for another run. The triboelectric charging and accumulation is extreme.
Fields as high a 50 kV/meter have been measured.
When the person reaches to pick up the devices out of the tray,
the ESD discharge can be very energetic. On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I had an extreme ESD episode
twice while going through security.
This article is intended to raise the awareness so damage is minimized.
Also it would be nice for the security people to use dissipative plastic trays or other means to reduce
the charge accumulation on the trays. A passive ionization system would be nice, but let's not hold our breaths.
After the 2nd ESD event, I
used one of the static elimination brushes covered in a previous article on static in cars. I passed the
brush over the insulative tray and computer to reduce the static charges by corona ionization. These passive
ionizers worked wonderfully to keep my computer and cell phone from being subjected over and over to significant
ESD injections. Since I am typing this article on the plane after these events, let's assume it survived.
Good
luck on your next trip. You have been warned!
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