Solving an electrical current issue for an American digital audio company

An American digital audio technology company was looking to solve a problem related to the static discharge associated with the graphic overlay in its professional studio sound mixing board. Our team proposed a successful solution and helped the client continue the product development process.

Melrose engineers identified the root cause of this problem, proposed a short-term solution, and delivered recommendations for long-term improvements.

The Challenge

Our customer needed to solve an issue related to static discharge in one of its products – a sound mixing device for sound studios.

Sound studios present two problems: they may be operated in low humidity environments, and people often touch the top surface on the device’s board. Static charge accumulates on the panel and flows to ground.

The electrons traveling across through the graphic overlay top panel cause issues. Since there is a current traveling across the panel, if it contains slots, the current might end up in the electronics located underneath. The current traveling across the polycarbonate graphic overlay causes another problem – inducing a current in display below the overlay causing them to malfunction.

Our Solutions

Our team printed conductive silver ink on the back of the overlay around every slot and then connected the conductive track to every other slot that had such conductive ink around it. A high performance adhesive was applied behind the overlay with electrically conductive z axis adhesive selectively applied to behind the silver traces to create the ground interface.

We solved the problem related to static discharge for our customer and helped the company in developing its product.