Although many people have not heard of it, electrostatic painting has been a standard in the auto industry for over 25 years. The auto makers found out that electrostatic painting techniques produced a uniform layer of paint with excellent adhesion.  The quality of the paint job was better, less paint was used to cover a given surface, and the overspray, that cloud of drifting paint particles that got on everything and everybody was almost eliminated, making the operation safer and more worker friendly.

With electrostatics, the paint is forced through an electrostatic field by various mechanical means.  The paint has to move through the electrostatic field fast enough that the atomized paint droplets draw the electrostatic charge out of the field with them and do not give it a chance to return to the field.  Once out of the nozzle, the droplets forming the spray cloud or pattern are carrying an electrostatic charge and looking for a place to land.  That place will be the nearest grounded surface.  For electrostatic painting to work properly, you need to insure that the target surface is grounded and has magnetic attraction.  Nearby objects which may also be grounded but which you don't want painted will have to be properly masked or otherwise protected as the charged paint particles will not discriminate between targets.

Electrostatic painting has several unique advantages that yield a very smooth finished surface.  First, charged paint particles leaving the end of the paint gun will repel each other in route to the work piece, resulting in further atomization along the way.  Second, when the droplets in the cloud are attracted to the target surface, the magnetism of an area of the surface covered by the charged droplet is cancelled out by the charge of that droplet and therefore other droplets flying around in the cloud will look for another area that still has attraction.  It is exactly these phenomena that allow electrostatic equipment to provide much more uniform coverage than conventional spray equipment.