Space station debris

What happens to small pieces of debris left floating around inside a derelict space station?

My space station had 100 people aboard, and due to sabotage, it decompressed and was abandoned. Inside, there are thousands of small items, like screws, papers, tools, usb memory sticks, forks, and so on.

Movies usually show these hanging around in the air, but what would really happen to them over years and decades? Would any kind of rotation of the station produce centrifigual forces that would move all the debris to the walls? Would static charges cause them to clump together? Would frictional losses from collisions mean everything comes to rest randomly distributed against the walls?

When the atmosphere was lost, it happened reasonably slowly by an irreversible evacuation of the air through the main air circulation system until it reached total vacuum. My scenario has no artificial gravity, so items would usually be secured, but the evacuation occurred during a riot and there were minor explosions, damage, and panic so it was quite messy inside.

50 years later I wonder what the inside looks like. Obviously I'm looking for realistic plausible answers here.

posted over 7 years ago

Innovine‭

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