Hello! Can you please help us with a project that our group is currently working on? We are thinking of using capacitive sensors for detecting microplastics that have been filtered in an aqueous solution by a teflon sheet. Since the dielectric current value of teflon is lower than microplastics as a whole, we thought that it might just work, although it's just hypothetically speaking. Will it work? If not, we would be delighted for advices regarding this. Thanks!
Was this one of you asking the same question a few days ago?:
https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=564114
Will it work?
Try it and let us know.
You'll have to thoroughly dry it first, water has a far higher dielectric constant than any plastic.
In theory if the coating of particles is thick enough it would make some difference, but you'd have
to use a precise electrode spacing for repeatable measurements, and remove all the moisture before
each measurement which seems cumbersome.
pert:
Was this one of you asking the same question a few days ago?:
how to make a microplastic detector or sensor? - Robotics - Arduino Forum
Yes, @pert
@MarkT, we were going to thoroughly filter the microplastics from sea salt to remove the moisture.
Context: Microplastics in sea salt.
From what I have researched, the dielectric current value of microplastics range from 2.3 to 3.0 and Teflon has a value of 2.0 - 2.2. We were going to make the capacitive sensors detect the microplastics that was filtered by a teflon sheet.
Microplastics that are saturated with water will have an even higher dielectric constant. I think teflon is
pretty good at resisting moisture diffusion, but you'd have to check that.