Have a problem to choose either Conductive ESD floor or Dissipative ESD floor?
By LearnESD.com Team
Grounding is a key principle to combat problems. There are a variety of wrist straps, footwear and flooring materials in the marketplace, all to help companies to ground their people and equipments so as to prevent electrostatic discharge.
Tackling problems is becoming more and more important nowadays when electronic chips are getting smaller and faster, utilizing little power and with more complex circuitry that makes some of them more susceptible to damage.
Wrist straps ground people and standard S20.20-1999 has made it mandatory for people to wear wrist straps in a seated position while handling ESDS items.
In a standing position, static charges that are built up in a person would be drained to ground through the floor material.
There are many types of floor material and to choose a correct and suitable floor material is a kind of problem when you do not know which is good for your operation.
The standard S20.20 requires a system resistance (person, footwear and floor) of not more than 35M ohm. That is a requirement set to meet the goal of achieving a human body voltage of less than 100V.
So what type of floor material that can help you to realize this goal?
Would it be a conductive floor or a dissipative floor?
A conductive floor coupled with conductive footwear with a person would definitely give a system resistance of no greater than 35M ohm.
A dissipative floor coupled with an footwear may or may not meet this requirement due to the fact that dissipative material has a wider resistance range.
A conductive floor is the preferred choice of flooring. It does not only help to control human walking body voltage to less than 100V, it also helps to drain any static charges that are built up on any objects to the ground at a faster rate.
On top of that, a conductive floor will help your organisation prepared to handle more sensitive ESDS items in the future.
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