Analysis of long corona charge decay times

Studies on materials with long charge decay times (notably pharmaceutical powders) have shown that the local charge decay time constant comes to increase linearly with time during the progress of charge decay. This is an empirical result. This linear increase provides the basis for calculating the time to 1/e and/or to 10% from much shorter periods of observation than the times to achieve these decays. The approach involves simple numerical processing of the rate of increase in the local charge decay time constant with time and the intercept of this at some selected time. This analysis is useful for assessing and comparing materials that have decay times over say 104 s.