The Electrostatic Processes Committee (EPC) was originally formed as a result of the widespread interest and activity in the application of electrostatic precipitation to air pollution control. The first meeting of the committee was organized by Professor Gaylord Penney of Carnegie-Mellon (inventor of the Westinghouse “Precipitron”). After two years, he arranged for the committee to be structured under the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), Committee on Electronics. Known as the “Subcommittee on Electrostatic Processes”, its first meeting was held in January 1949 as part of the AIEE mid-winter meeting in New York.
Following the 1963 amalgamation of the AIEE and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) into the IEEE, the Electrostatic Processes Committee experienced a period of change. Initially, it held its sessions as part of the IEEE Power Group Annual Meetings and in 1968, the sessions were held as part of the Industry and General Applications Group (IGA) later to become the Industry Application Society (IAS). In the early years of its association with the IGA group, interest in the Electrostatic Processes Committee declined for a few years followed by a period of rapid growth due to the active promotion of the subject of electrostatics by a dedicated group of individuals representing both academia and industry. Prominent among these were Professor Gaylord Penney from Carnegie-Mellon, Professor Ion I. Inculet, the University of Western Ontario, Charles Gallo, Xerox and Sam Hawke, Battelle Memorial Institute. During the 1970’s, there was a broadening of subject matter, including electrophotography, electrical coronas and applied electrostatics with an expansion into the international audience. Electrostatics became recognized as an academic discipline with important industrial significance. In the years that followed, the Electrostatic Processes Committee held its technical sessions as part of the IAS Annual Meeting. Typically, eight paper sessions were held; papers were published in the Record of the Annual Meeting and then peer reviewed for possible publication in the Transactions.
Within IAS the EPC was originally part of the Industrial Utilization Systems Department and then became part of the Manufacturing Systems Development and Applications Department in 1993. Around 2006/2007, a number of committees under the Industrial Power Conversion Systems Department (IPCSD) decided to develop closer ties with the IEEE Power Electronics Society and its Power Electronics Specialists Conference (PESC). The Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE) was developed to include all of the interests of the IPCSD Committees (Electric Machines, Industrial Power Convertor, Industrial Drives, and Power Electronics Devices and Components) previously presented at the IAS Annual Meeting along with the corresponding interests that had been previously presented at PESC. The first ECCE was held in 2009 and is now held annually. The EPC has remained a part of the IAS Annual Meeting.
In 2003, EPC and ESA experimented with a joint conference held in Little Rock, Arkansas, followed in 2006 by the first full joint meeting sponsored by EPC, ESA, Institute of Electrostatics Japan (IEJ) and the French Society of Electrostatics (SFE) held in Berkeley California. This showed the attraction of the concept and a second joint meeting followed in Boston in 2009 with a third held in June 2012 in Cambridge Ontario. In the latter two, the meeting was sponsored by EPC, ESA, IEJ, SFE and the International Electrostatic Assembly (IEA). The joint program format has proven to be very successful and features oral presentations, poster presentations and demonstration workshops. The meetings feature presentations offered by participants from many countries and attract high attendance with good representation from students and young researchers.
Now the Electrostatic Processes Committee is dealing topics related to fundamentals and industrial applications of electrostatics including but not limited to electro-hydrodynamics, electrostatic measurements, computational electrostatics, electrostatic precipitation and separation, coronas and gas discharges, and ESD/EOS.
*This article referenced the thesis of G S Peter Castle and William D Greason (2014-EPC-0285).