Revision 1

Accepted · first revision · record

Title: Physical origin of the triboelectric series
Plain: Materials can be ranked in a list, the triboelectric series, in which each material charges negative against those above it. The list is only partly reproducible and no material property is known that predicts it.
Precise: Find a measurable material property (effective work function, acid-base surface chemistry, water affinity, Lewis basicity, elastic or fracture properties) that predicts sign and magnitude of contact charge for arbitrary insulator pairs, and determine whether the series is transitive under clean controlled contact or contains cyclic violations. An answer is a predictor with quantified success rate on a benchmark of pairs plus a transitivity test.
Settled by: Controlled-atmosphere pairwise charging of a large set of materials, with transitivity tested and a single property predicting the order.
Kind: well-posed
Answer type: identification
References: (empty)
Literature status: open
Status note: (empty)
Posed since: 1757