Originally Posted by Demigrog

This should be an interesting thread.

The devil is in the numbers, and it is going to take a lot of number crunching to support your examples.

For example, I'd be really surprised if the gravitational energy converted by rubbing two balloons together even remotely matched the static charge created. For one thing, you'd get different results with hollow objects versus filled objects, materials with different densities and thicknesses, etc. It'd also be hard to explain the correlation of normal force and friction coefficient to charge accumulation (capacitance, maybe?). Finally explaining triboelectrification would be cool though...