Harnessing atmospheric electric discharge, lightning

[Mountain]

Harnessing atmospheric electric discharge, lightning.

 

Theoretically lightning can be harnessed by storing it in capacitors, which take electrical charges very quickly. Fit one pole of a capacitor to the ground and the other to an areal, high enough to attract lightning. So when a lightning strikes the areal, it should charge the capacitor. After that, disconnect the capacitor from the areal and the ground and use the electrical charge for anything useful.

 

Practically, may capacitors have to be used to harness the lightning energy as much as possible when it takes place. Each capacitor have to be very large with overload protection and polarity charge detectors. The system has to include an automatic mechanism to divert charging path from a capacitor after fully charged to the next discharged capacitor.

 

This idea came to me after seeing pictures of Khalifa Tower hit by lightning, same pictures can be seen here:http://www.aliraqi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=99238

. I have also mentioned this idea on the amendments I made on my patent pending idea: Linear Electric Generator Force Multiplier: http://force-multiplier-machine.2move.me.uk/

 

This theory is based on my present knowledge about electricity and lightning and lightning could have some secrets, which I don't know and could invalidate this theory.

[Horza2002]

I'm not totally up to speed with electricity anymore (its been a while) but I dont think theres a material that could be used as a dielectric and then survive the massive charge resulting from the lightening strike.

[PaulS1950]

Look up "Leyden jar" one of the oldest capacitors that I know.

 

Paul, the 60 year old student

[Mountain]

Look up "Leyden jar" one of the oldest capacitors that I know.

 

Paul, the 60 year old student

 

Leyden jar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar

 

Mountain: The 64 year old self-taught student

Edited June 10, 2010 by Mountain

[Moontanman]

A Leyden jar cannot capture a lightning bolt, it can capture a static charge but no Leyden jar could stand up to a bolt of lightning.

[PaulS1950]

It can't capture the entire lightning bolt but it would charge to that point where the two foils and the insulation between them broke down. I would expect the "air gap" around the top of the jar would become the path of an arc once the voltage reached that potential. Is there a reason that the jar would not retain whatever energy was blow that threshold?

[Mountain]

It can't capture the entire lightning bolt but it would charge to that point where the two foils and the insulation between them broke down. I would expect the "air gap" around the top of the jar would become the path of an arc once the voltage reached that potential. Is there a reason that the jar would not retain whatever energy was blow that threshold?

 

All these draw backs can be overcome with overload protectors and insulators to prevent arcs.capacitors made for this purpose need to be made according to a model passes reseach and development for this purpose. Obviously a series of large capacitors needed to capture the energy of a lightning strike as much as possible one after another.

 

According to the Ssource bellow one lightning strike has 1 billion KW power, which is almost 280,000 KW/hour. This has a monetary value of £28,000.00 at 10p/KWH.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Properties

[insane_alien]

According to the Ssource bellow one lightning strike has 1 billion KW power, which is almost 280,000 KW/hour. This has a monetary value of £28,000.00 at 10p/KWH.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Properties

 

how do you get 280,000kW/hour? that doesn't make sense.

 

also, kW/h doesn't equal kWh

 

you seem to mixing up energy an power and god knows what else.

 

in another thread(can't remember which) i done the proper calculation and you do not get feasible amounts of energy at all.

 

EDIT: just checked that thread and seen that it seems to be specific to the thread.

 

globally there are around 44 strikes per second, we'll round that up to 100 to make the numbers easier (and add weight to how infeasible this is) and wikipedia also says there is about 500MJ a strike, but we;ll double this to 1GJ to make the maths easier. so we have 100GW of lightning for THE ENTIRE SURFACE OF THE EARTH.

 

this is enough to take maybe 15-25 large power stations off line but require blanketing the earth in lightning capture towers and assumes they are 100% efficient and then you still have the rest of the power stations. needed to supply our electricity.

 

but hey, lightning isn't evenly distributed, so lets say you want to build one in a place where lightning is extremely frequent. Kifuka gets 158strikes per km^2 per year. using the numbers above this translates into 158GJ/km^2 per year or 5.01kW per square kilometer. thats essentially an average US house. so for the US you'd need 250 million square kilometers(1.7 time the land area of earth or almost half the total surface area of earth) of prime lightning space to power the domestic requirements of the US. as all this prime lightning space doesn't in fact exist, powering the US would be impossible. hell, powering the UK would be impossible unless you went with my optimistic values and harnessed all lightning everywhere with near 100% efficiency.

 

5.01 kW from a square kilometer is absolutely terrible. especially as i'm being generous so the real value is more than likely half that if not less. you could achieve the same power output from only a few square meters of solar panels and for much cheaper too.

Edited June 11, 2010 by insane_alien

[Mountain]

average peak power output of a single lightning stroke is about one trillion watts — one "terawatt"

 

Dear insane_alien,

 

The above quote is from this source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Properties

 

So one trillion Wat = one billion KW = (one billion KW)/(3600 Seconds=1 hour)= 277,778= 280,000KWH

 

I am self-taught person. I could be wrong.

[insane_alien]

yes, it is one billion kilowatts, but have you ever seen a lightning strike that has taken a whole hour to complete?

 

you might notice that in the next sentence on the wiki page that the terawatt power only lasts 30 millionths of a second.

 

also, to calculate the energy you multiply by the time, not divide. your units don't work out, kW/h does not equal kWh

 

The important part is the energy of the strike, not its power. and wikipedia lists the energy as 500MJ or 138.9kWh

[Mountain]

yes, it is one billion kilowatts, but have you ever seen a lightning strike that has taken a whole hour to complete?

 

you might notice that in the next sentence on the wiki page that the terawatt power only lasts 30 millionths of a second.

 

also, to calculate the energy you multiply by the time, not divide. your units don't work out, kW/h does not equal kWh

 

The important part is the energy of the strike, not its power. and wikipedia lists the energy as 500MJ or 138.9kWh

 

Yes, it lasts 30 millionth of a second but still has a power of 1 billion KW = 1 billion KJ, which can run (1 billion KJ)/(60 Wat light bulbs)=17 million 60 wat light bulbs. In other words this 1 bill. KW can run 17 million 60w light bulbs for ONE SECOND.

[insane_alien]

one billion kW(note the small k) is NOT 1 billion kJ.

 

when looking to harness this energy, you need to get the average energy over time. and this is 500MJ * the number of strikes per second.

[Mountain]

Yes, it lasts 30 millionth of a second but still has a power of 1 billion KW = 1 billion KJ, which can run (1 billion KJ)/(60 Wat light bulbs)=17 million 60 wat light bulbs. In other words this 1 bill. KW can run 17 million 60w light bulbs for ONE SECOND.

 

I am just correcting this post, which I thought I ignored it, didn't post. I want to reword this post like this:

 

Yes, it lasts 30 millionth of a second but still has a power of 1 billion KW = 1 billion KJ, which can run (1 billion KJ)/(1 KW heater) = 1 billion 1 KW heaters for one second or 1 KW heater for 1 billion seconds = 278,000 hours = 11,574 days = 32 years.

 

Assuming 30 millionths of a second has a bearing, still this power can run a 1 KW heater for 8 hours, which is not bad.

Edited June 12, 2010 by Mountain

[insane_alien]

Assuming 30 millionths of a second has a bearing, still this power can run a 1 KW heater for 8 hours, which is not bad.

 

actually, that is terrible. that means you can't even run a single house for a single day based on one lightning strike. do you see why you cannot do anything useful? you're never going to make up the cost of building whatever it is you use to capture the energy and most of the time you'll need to run of external sources anyway.

 

and you are still getting power/energy mixed up

 

1 kW DOES NOT EQUAL 1 kJ

 

1 kW * 1 second = 1kJ

 

but that point is moot as a lightning strike lasts nowhere near 1 second.

[Mountain]

actually, that is terrible. that means you can't even run a single house for a single day based on one lightning strike. do you see why you cannot do anything useful? you're never going to make up the cost of building whatever it is you use to capture the energy and most of the time you'll need to run of external sources anyway.

 

and you are still getting power/energy mixed up

 

1 kW DOES NOT EQUAL 1 kJ

 

1 kW * 1 second = 1kJ

 

but that point is moot as a lightning strike lasts nowhere near 1 second.

 

What about the lightnings, which we can see and lasts for 10 or more seconds some times.

[insane_alien]

i've never seen a strike last 10 seconds, its after image in my eyes sure, but never the actual bolt.

 

some do last longer than a few microseconds though, but it is still a value much smaller than a second, a 100 milliseconds tops. but the power of a lightning bolt is not a constant. it will start very high, and as the potential difference between cloud and ground drops(a rapid process) the power will drastically reduce.

 

wikipedia says that your going to average about 500MJ a strike. thats all. this may seem a lot of energy but its really not that impressive at all for utility power.

[Mountain]

i've never seen a strike last 10 seconds, its after image in my eyes sure, but never the actual bolt.

 

some do last longer than a few microseconds though, but it is still a value much smaller than a second, a 100 milliseconds tops. but the power of a lightning bolt is not a constant. it will start very high, and as the potential difference between cloud and ground drops(a rapid process) the power will drastically reduce.

 

wikipedia says that your going to average about 500MJ a strike. thats all. this may seem a lot of energy but its really not that impressive at all for utility power.

 

This lightning strike from this source bellow lasted for half an hour: http://www.aliraqi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=99238

 

Anyway, we both talk about theories, which have not yet put under test practically and I am not going to give up mine until practically proved or disproved.

[insane_alien]

oreally, do you have a source saying that a single strike lasted half an hour? because that would be so extraordinary it would have recieved global press coverage.

 

look, the fact is that lightning bolts simply don't have enough energy and don't occur often enough to power much of anything continuously. or even be worth capturing the energy for utilisation.

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Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

well, cause i'm bored, i'll do a quick capital cost estimation of such a plant.

 

you're average lightning strike is typically 30 coloumbs(there is a different type of lightning that carries a lot more but we will consider them out of spec for the plant as they are much much rarer).

 

I can't find a source of the average voltage of a normal lightning bolt but i don't think 1 million volts would be far off the mark.

 

so what sort of size of capacitor are we looking for?

 

luckily capcitance equations are simple. C=Q/V so we have 30 Columbs (Q=30)

 

and EDLC(the biggest types of capacitor) are usually around 2.7V (V=2.7)

 

so we need a capacitor bank that has a capacitance of 30/2.7=11.1F

 

http://www.nesscap.com/products_lineup.htm sells a 25F capacitor but it can only handle 20.1A.

 

so how many of them do we need in parallel? again easy. we take the current of lightning (30000A) and divide it by the maximum current the capacitors can take(20.1A) which gives us 1492.57 capacitors. http://www.newark.com/illinois-capacitor/256dcn2r7q/supercap-alum-elect-25f-2-7v-radial/dp/02P4416 will sell them for $2.99

 

so for the capacitors alone we're looking at $4464 your big metal tower to collect the lightning will probably set you back at least 2 grand.

 

so we stand at ~$6500 per station. while this may sound good, you only get 500MJ per strike. thats 138.9kWh. at 10c per kWh thats $13.89 per strike.

 

so to break even you need to fully capture, store and distribute 468 strikes.

 

in the US you're likely to get 15 strikes per year. so thats 31.2 years to break even. BUT the lifetime of your capacitors isn't that high, you'll have to replace them every 10 years as they decay. each 10 years you need an extra 321 strikes to cover your capacitor costs.

 

so in 10 years you made $2083.5 but you lost $4464 to equipment costs.

 

not a sound investment if you ask me.

 

also, $208.35 per year isn't enough to live on.

 

now do you see why this is a fruitless endeavour?

 

and if further proof were needed for the infeasability of this, i have just noticed i dodn't account for the fact that you're putting a million or so volts across the capacitors on charging. you can't really do that. so you'd have to series them up.

 

quick calculation, 1,000,000V/2.7V = 370371(rounded up cause you can't get .37 of a capacitor)

 

in series, but wait, we have many capacitors in parallel as well, that means 370371*1493 =55,293,903 capacitors.

 

so that would cost, 55293903*$2.99 = $1,653,362,070 EVERY TEN YEARS

 

and thats just for one little station.

 

Sleep deprivation make you do funny things eh?

Edited June 13, 2010 by insane_alien
Consecutive posts merged.

[Mountain]

oreally, do you have a source saying that a single strike lasted half an hour? because that would be so extraordinary it would have recieved global press coverage.

-------

 

 

?

 

Dear insane_alien,

 

This was a great input from you. But things may not be as simple as that. For the start, capacitors used for this purpose have to pass the test, specially made and thousands of times bigger than the capacitors, which we have seen in the market.

 

In nuclear reaserch, certain type of capacitors used to create very high temperature heat. These capacitors are charged with billion KW power and let discharged in a fraction of a second to create very high temperature, thousands of degrees high. So already technology exists to build capacitors for this purpose, obviously needs capacitors of this type.

 

To get the lightening, you don't have to wait for random chances. For example you can force lightning to occur and to direct it to storages. All clouds are always charged, all you have to do is to go there to collect it. One way could be done is by sending rockets with conductors into the cloud to cause discharge and force it down through the conductors into storages on the ground. You can create mobile storage units to follow clouds to milk them. This is just a simple example.

 

With my best regards to you.

[insane_alien]

you are still talking fantastically expensive capacitors and devices for miniscule amounts of energy. with the cheap energy produced by nuclear, hydroelectric, even solar it is NEVER going to be competitive and its NEVER going to be able to provide enough power to be considered worthy.

 

if you are making the thing mobile its not even going to be able to cover its own energy expenditure.

 

you'll notice i'm not saying we don't have the technology, i know we do, its just that its not worth it. you're not going to be able to generate the energy required to construct the plant and cover the running costs. even at 100% efficiency which its not going to be. you're probably looking at 5% for the prototype plant and if you continue stubbornly on to build a second generation maybe 20% efficiency.

[Mountain]

you are still talking fantastically expensive capacitors and devices for miniscule amounts of energy. with the cheap energy produced by nuclear, hydroelectric, even solar it is NEVER going to be competitive and its NEVER going to be able to provide enough power to be considered worthy.

 

if you are making the thing mobile its not even going to be able to cover its own energy expenditure.

 

you'll notice i'm not saying we don't have the technology, i know we do, its just that its not worth it. you're not going to be able to generate the energy required to construct the plant and cover the running costs. even at 100% efficiency which its not going to be. you're probably looking at 5% for the prototype plant and if you continue stubbornly on to build a second generation maybe 20% efficiency.

 

I agree on the question of the cost. Off course if it is not competitive, there is no point to invest into it. But we have to bear in mind that we still talk about theories, without practical proof. As far as I know, no research has been done on this field for this purpose.

 

With my best regards.

[insane_alien]

actually, research has been done. its even gotten to the point of working devices being created.

 

there is a section on it on the wikipedia page previously refferenced and it has external refferences.

 

they still say its crap and they point out the horrendous inefficiency of converting such a high voltage into a low voltage for storage.

[Mountain]

actually, research has been done. its even gotten to the point of working devices being created.

 

there is a section on it on the wikipedia page previously refferenced and it has external refferences.

 

they still say its crap and they point out the horrendous inefficiency of converting such a high voltage into a low voltage for storage.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Harvesting_lightning_energy

 

Harvesting lightning energy

 

Since the late 1980s there have been several attempts to investigate the possibility of harvesting energy from lightning. While a single bolt of lightning carries a relatively large amount of energy, this energy is concentrated in a small location and is passed during an extremely short period of time (milliseconds); therefore, extremely high electrical power is involved.[122] It has been proposed that the energy contained in lightning be used to generate hydrogen from water, or to harness the energy from rapid heating of water due to lightning.[123]

A technology capable of harvesting lightning energy would need to be able to capture rapidly the high power involved in a lightning bolt. Several schemes have been proposed, but the low energy involved in each lightning bolt render lightning power harvesting from ground based lightning rods as impractical.[124] According to Northeastern University physicists Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, a lightning bolt carries a few million joules of energy, enough to power a 100-watt bulb for 5.5 hours. Additionally, lightning is sporadic, and therefore energy would have to be collected and stored; it is difficult to convert high-voltage electrical power to the lower-voltage power that can be stored.[123]

In the summer of 2007, an alternative energy company called Alternate Energy Holdings (AEH) tested a method for capturing the energy in lightning bolts. The design for the system had been purchased from an Illinois inventor named Steve LeRoy, who had reportedly been able to power a 60-watt light bulb for 20 minutes using the energy captured from a small flash of artificial lightning. The method involved a tower, a means of shunting off a large portion of the incoming energy, and a capacitor to store the rest. According to Donald Gillispie, CEO of AEH, they "couldn't make it work," although "given enough time and money, you could probably scale this thing up... it's not black magic; it's truly math and science, and it could happen."[125]