Electrostatic Sensor in Circular and Rectangular Shape Electrode for Solid Dry Pneumatic Conveyor System M.R. Ghazali 1 , W.I. Ibrahim 1 and M.F. Rahmat 2 1 Faculty of Electrical & Electronics Engineering Universiti Malaysia Pahang 26600 Pekan Pahang, Malaysia riduwan@ump.edu.my 2 Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering Faculty of Electrical Engineering Universiti Teknologi Malaysia 81310 Skudai Johor, Malaysia fuaad@fke.utm.my Abstract—The electrostatic sensor was used in industrial process because of less expensive and robust design. The particles movement in pneumatic conveying system can generate the electrostatic charges. The charges can be detected by using the sensing devices such as electrodes or plates. The electrodynamics transducer or associated electronics circuit on the sensing device was used to convert the charge to the voltage. The sensing device was built from conductor and insulator materials that have the different size and shape. Three types of electrodes that commonly used were pin, quarter ring and ring shapes. This paper focuses on pin shape with variation of size for circular and rectangular shapes. Non-intrusive method was designed and applied to the both shapes to investigate the sensitivity of the sensor. Keywords— particle, electrostatic,sensing devices, non-intrusive, sensitivity. 1. Introduction Particles in pneumatic pipelines carry a certain amount of net electrostatic charge. The electrification of the particles in pneumatic conveying can be attributed mainly to collisions between particles, impacts between particles and pipe wall and friction between particles and air stream [4]. The charge carried on the particles can be detected by suitable sensors, which derive their signals from the fluctuations in electric field caused by the passage of the flowing particles. To examine the fundamental interactions between the charged particles and the sensor and to quantify the sensing characteristics, physical and mathematical modeling of the sensor is necessary [4]. The principle of measurement techniques based on electrostatic phenomena in pneumatics pipelines is contains information of velocity and mass flow rate of particles. The information of particle is depend on large particle will carry higher charge on its surface than a smaller one [1]. This charge level will be detected by using electrostatic sensing and convert it to voltage signal. The charge level can be represented by: () () Vt qt α = ∑ (1) where, 66 2011 International Conference on Circuits, System and Simulation IPCSIT vol.7 (2011) © (2011) IACSIT Press, Singapore