Capturing Lightning

[Phil Timmons]

Has anyone tried or pondered any designs for "capturing" lightning?  Looking through the site and seeing a discussion of your windmills getting toasted by lightning, got me thinking about that again.

I did a site search (this site) and did not find anything like that.  Maybe for a good reason, huh?

Namely, y'all aint crazy!

But speaking of crazy . . .  looking through the topics that a search brought up . . . . THIS one should be a "Front Page Classic"

Cross-posting --'free energy' for off-grid living

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2004/9/17/143940/219

Funny stuff.

Anyway, yeah, I know that catching lightning and dissipating it across the grid is marginally lunatic, but I have sort of played in this domain (high energy emag pulses) a good while back in school with rail and coil guns.  Kind of big ones.  I am supposing there are other good applications of lightning capture along with selling it on the grid - like a lightning fired rail or coil gun.  

I did a wider search and found a "concept only" on halfbakery.com, but not really thought through.  And mostly just games stuff.  Not really my thing.

Anyway if anyone has played with that or knows sources of those who have, I would appreciate it.  

Thanks, Phil

[wooferhound]

How big of a capaciter do you need to store enough power to run a city for a few days?

[old55olds]

I think a fella called Tesla tried this for a couple of days. Maybe some of his caps are still sitting around for sale cheap.

Ken

[Phil Timmons]

Well, my quick and dirty math is that should probably be a Flux Capacitor that can handle about 1.21 gigawatts.  Oh wait a minute, that is for a time machine . .. .

Good thing this topic is in the "rants" section, huh?

Anyway, I do not think you would really want to store it.  At least that is my bias.  `tricity goes stall fast.  When you got it, sell it now.  If it must be stored, it seems like gravity and water are about the best storage medium for large applications.

A little more seriously, some of the models I was considering for handling it does use capacitors.  Long series to handle the high voltage aspects, and then the long series string is switched to all parallel to bleed the energy off of them after a "hit."  Turns a high voltage condition into a high current condition.  And that is good for selling on the grid.

[wooferhound]

and the second question would be

How many volts would this capaciter need to be rated at

no Solid State inverters here

[wooferhound]

OK ,  I googled around trying to find out about the energy in lightning. The figures I found were WILDLY VARYED and almost none of the sites I found had the same numbers and figures. I also found out that a large part of the energy in lightning is in the form of Heat and Radio Waves. Here is some of the better sites I saw . . .

Forum discussion stating that the biggest bolt of lightning only has One Megawatt Hour of energy

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/topic/t-4742_Lightning_as_a_power_source.html

Kinda weird Article about storing the power of Lightning into a Bank of CRTs Cathode Ray Tubes)

http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=lightning

Another discussion ending up saying you should tap the energy from the cloud before the strike

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Lightning_20Power_20Plant

Informative page saying that Lighning is several hundred million volts and 5000 to 20000 Amps

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/lightning2.html#c2

Discussion talking about using lightning to make Hydrogen and Oxygen from water

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/lightning2.html#c2

Super cool site about giant sparks, Check out the great videos of high voltage switch openings

http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm

[Phil Timmons]

Hope you do not mind if I do some combining/replying . ..

wooferhound:

and the second question would be

How many volts would this capaciter need to be rated at

no Solid State inverters here

Phil:

Since it (my pondering) is a string of capacitors, they do not have to be rated to handle the full voltage,  Caps in a series make a voltage divider - so say a million volts across a 1000 capacitors (just making some simple numbers for our conversation) would only have to handle a 1000 volts, each . ... (1e6 volts / 1000 = 1000 volts).

I would not really be inclined to do solid state inverters for something like this.  Maybe so, but my initial guess would be old DC motor generator sets.  But maybe solid state, but you have to keep the cost low.

wooferhound:

OK , I googled around trying to find out about the energy in lightning. The figures I found were WILDLY VARYED and almost none of the sites I found had the same numbers and figures. I also found out that a large part of the energy in lightning is in the form of Heat and Radio Waves. Here is some of the better sites I saw . . .

Phil:

Thanks.  Thanks a lot. I will be reading them tonight.  Quick review of your observations . . .

wooferhound:

Forum discussion stating that the biggest bolt of lightning only has One Megawatt Hour of energy

Phil:

That sounds reasonable.  At 10 cents a kilowatt/hour, that makes them worth about $100 each?

Boy that is a grim way to look at harvesting nature, huh?  $100 bucks a lightning bolt, do I hear $101?  And we got some lovely redwoods and rivers to harvest, too.  Get your bids in now.

wooferhound:

Kinda weird Article about storing the power of Lightning into a Bank of CRTs Cathode Ray Tubes)

Phil:

Yeah, you can store electricity in a lot of weird ways.  CRT tubes do handle some high voltage.

wooferhound:

Another discussion ending up saying you should tap the energy from the cloud before the strike

Phil:

I would tend to strongly agree with that.  There are some very simple static combs designs that use a spark-gap (similar to a spark plug) to discharge energy to a capacitor bank when the voltages reach the low 1000's volts.

wooferhound:

Informative page saying that Lighning is several hundred million volts and 5000 to 20000 Amps

Phil:

Sounds about in line with 1 megawatt/hour observation - if we are using the lower numbers and allowing a 1/10 of a second . . . (1/36000th of an hour) . . . . 100e6 volts * 5000 amps * 1/36000 = 1.39 megawatt hours.

But those numbers sound GREAT for a rail or coil gun.  I am thinking cheap space launch of small things.

wooferhound:

Discussion talking about using lightning to make Hydrogen and Oxygen from water

Phil:

Yeah, could do that.  I sort of like ocean-based remote Big Wind for that.  

Well, thanks again.

[kww]

I store lightning all the time, I use cloud-capacitors, which I sell very reasonable, free shipping too. ;-)

[finnsawyer]

Make a tank circuit using a superconductor or nearly superconducting coil and a capacitor?  Get this thing to ring for a long enough period of time to draw usable power out of it?

Or maybe get the lightning bolt to cause some sort of chemical change that can then be tapped for power?  For instance convert aluminum oxide to aluminum and then use the aluminum in a battery?

[Phil Timmons]

Thank you, Zeus.

[finnsawyer]

Actually with a superconducting coil a one volt capacitor would work.  All the energy goes into the magnetic field around the super conductor.

[fishfarm]

From the New Journal of Physics published 15 August 2002:

"It follows from the above argument that if lightning can be diverted, it may also then be possible to store these atmospheric electrical charges through the use of conducting electrodes and capacitor banks as shown in figure 1 [8]. Once the plasma filament is created through laser ionization, stray charges are collected from electrified clouds during thunderstorms or from the ionosphere in clear weather. These charges will flow through a conductive electrode as they approach the ground to avoid the possibility of artificially triggering a lightning discharge that may destroy the laser system. This electrode will then pass these charges onto a capacitor bank to store them. Utilizing this form of atmospheric electricity may provide a new alternative source of energy in the future, while discharging a thundercloud and thus reducing potential lightning strikes at sensitive airborne operation and ground installations."

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/4/1/361/nj2161.html

[fishfarm]

Here's another link:

Lightning Rod Energy Storage System

http://wildcat.phys.nwu.edu/classes/2002Fall/Phyx135-2/Projects/Lightning_Stored/lightning_store2.ht
ml

[wooferhound]

So ,  All I need now is a Superconducting Coil and it would be possable ?

[finnsawyer]

Yep.  Assume you have a nearly superconducting ring.  Run your wire from the lightning collector down vertically through the center of the ring.  When lightning strikes, the current in the wire will cause a magnetic field in the ring.  If you place a coil around the ring you can get current out as the magnetic field collapses.  It occurs to me that with a perfectly conducting ring it might not be possible to get a magnetic field to form in it.  In that case one would get currents flowing around on the surface of the ring and a magnet field outside of it.  Curious.

[TERRYWGIPE]

I watched a special on this very subject. the physicists that were doing the experiments(I believe somewhere in the Rockies), ran into three major problems.

They were using an advanced version of Franklin's kite,(a small rocket fired into a cloud, connected to a tower by a steel cable). The first problem was the bank of capacitors that the strike would blow up. second was the cable would incinerate. And third was predicting the strikes in the first place. The man/woman, na man who solves these problems could be a rich man

                        Terry

                                             

[Phil Timmons]

Well speaking metaphorically, if that does not further confuse the matter . . .  

If you all have ever visited any of the Big Dam powersites -- Like Hoover Dam, or Grand Coulee -- you might notice that they are HUGH dams because they are stopping the entire river with the dam, and generating power.  While that makes a lot of power, it also takes a huge dam.

But if you have ever been by the power works at Niagara Falls (and Horseshoe Falls -- can't dis' Canada ), you might notice that most of the river there goes over the falls . . . the power plant only routes a fraction of the water . . . but it still makes a lot of power.

How this applies to capturing lightning.  You do not really have to route the entire lightning bolt into your backdoor to get some of the power available.  Just creating the conditions that build the charge -- for example, should not an elevated conducting surface, should be able to "tap" the static charge in the air independent of taking a direct strike.  

The Niagara example also does not attempt to "store" the power.  (Capacitor Banks, speaking metaphorically).  I do not get why so many seem to misdirect themselves (in this and other energy issues) into storage, when creation, distribution, and use of energy seem to be where the action is.  

[ghurd]

Terry

Watch out about the 'man' thing.

Commanda... She probably already has a thing to do it!

Ruffle her feathers and she won't show it to you!

G-

[Laylow]

Well, you all are way ahead of me on this topic.  I guess gathering electrons from clouds would be the way to do it but why isn't it happening?  I guess if I had something tall enough to reach clouds I would be thinking that way.  I did see the thing on TV where they shot model rockets up into the sky to get lightning to strike in a very straight line.  It's the sight of the lightning that gets people to start thinking about all of the energy that must be there in the first place.  So naturally that's where people first start to think about capturing it, after the strike.

So, my idea involved shootin one of them rockets in the sky and using the energy to vaporize a subterranian chamber of water.  The expansion of the water vapor is used to force several massive pistons in a vertical direction.  The pistons are held in place at the highest point that they reached by some mechanical means while the pressure in the chamber is restabilized.  The chamber is then sealed off and gravity slowly drives the pistons to produce hydraulic power.

I know it sounds low tech but I just have a hard time imagining stuff getting hit by lightning without melting.  I was thinking at the time that we just need to harness the power from a big explosion.  But you guys and your cloud thieving methods have spoiled my fun ;]