A Non-destructive Thermal Stimulus Method as a Tool for studying the Electrical Double Layer

When a liquid is put into contact with a solid, two charge layers of opposite signs appear at the interface. This Electrical Double Layer (EDL) is the result of electrochemical reactions occurring in the region separating the liquid and the solid. A bottleneck in understanding and quantifying the EDL and its behavior is the availability of direct methods allowing to fully measure the EDL charge and distribution. This paper concerns the use of the Thermal Step Method (TSM) as a tool for characterizing the EDL to complete the flow electrification method. Several dielectric liquids (cyclohexane, mineral oil and silicon oil) are subjected to thermal step measurements. The obtained results are analyzed and discussed with respect to literature and to numerical simulations.