Forgive me for how high level this is but this is the goal I'm trying to achieve here:
I want to build a device that has dangling ribbons of a material (lets say nylon for now) that can be actuated to turn electrostatic attraction on and off. The idea here is that these ribbons will be collecting floating pollen in the air using the electrostatic, and later released by turning the electrostatic off. The device would resemble something of a wind chime, just nylon ribbons instead of pipes.
My question is then: how (if at all possible) do I apply and then remove electrostatic charge from a collection of ribbons?
EDIT: This will be an aerial project (from a drone) using an onboard 12 V distribution board from a 3 cell 75 C lipo battery.
Best Answer
Won't work with Nylon: you need a conductor to be able to move/remove charges from it.
But, that's actually commonly done: in powder coating (to protect metal surfaces), you connect the conducting piece you want to coat to a high voltage source. The other end, you'd bring to about earth potential.
As soon as you don't need the attractive force anymore, you'd disable the high-voltage source and discharge your conductive objects to earth.
Note that your ribbons don't need to be good conductors, just so-and-so conductors; so any fabric that has undergone some metallization or contains carbon fibers or wiring will do.
The real problem is: your pollen isn't deterministically charged. That way, it'll be hard to attract it to the conductive surfaces. In powder coating, this is solved by the "gun" that sprays the powder being oppositely charged to the target.