Abstract
Charged micro-particles are widely used as the key components for many electrical applications such as an e-paper, a touch panel, a printer toner and an electronic ink. Among them, the e-paper is an emerging reflective type display using the charged particles that has the advantages of the extremely low power consumption and sunlight readability. To create images on the e-paper, we confine black positively-charged and white negatively-charged particles between bottom and top electrodes and selectively apply the electric field. When the Coulomb force by an applied electric field is greater than the adhesion force between the charged particle and the electrode, the particles' transition happens resulting in the change of color between black and white. Therefore, the adhesion force is a very important factor for designing and estimating e-paper's operation. In this study, we constructed a basic model for particle's transition and an adhesion force equation describing particle's transition with three different forces: electrostatic image force, Van der Waals force and gravitational force. The simulation results showed that the gravitational force is negligible for the interesting range for the charge and the radius, and the adhesion force can be strongly dependent on the particle's charge and radius.
