Electrostatic disruption of a charged conducting spheroid

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Electrostatic disruption of elongated or chain-like parent grains following sudden charging to high electrostatic potentials was recently offered as a specific mechanism for a certain cometary phenomenon, namely the appearance of the so-called striae or pseudosynchronic bands observed in several comets. Idealizing these grains as spheroids with greatest fragility at their centers, we have calculated the polar and equatorial electrostatic tension for axis ratios between 0.01 and 1000. We find that while the polar pressure is larger than the equatorial pressure for prolate spheroids, the opposite is true for oblate spheroids. This means that while prolate spheroids will split along the equatorial plane when charged to a high enough potential, oblate spheroids will split along a meridional plane.We have also calculated the electrostatic polar pressure profile along the polar axis for prolate spheroids. In all cases this pressure increases monotonically from a minimum at the center to maxima at the ends. The variation becomes less marked as the axis ratio decreases, becoming a constant for a sphere. This means that as a prolate spheroid of uniform tensile strength is charged up it will continue to chip off at its ends when the electrostatic pressure there exceeds the uniform tensile strength of the grain. During this chipping process the charge per unit length of the grain remains constant while it becomes less and less prolate. The final outcome could be one of two things: If the tensile strength of the grain is sufficiently large the end chipping process will eventually cease while the grain still remains prolate. Otherwise, it will continue chipping off until it becomes spherical, at which time it will explode in toto.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: