Can we store thunder energy?

[atinymonkey]

Ohfortheloveofgod, the heat alone would cause the water to form vapour rapidly enough to cause an explosion. You simply can't transfer that much energy that quickly to water.

[Callipygous]

I guess you calculated it to prove me wrong?

 

There will be a huge current' date=' but it is over a few micro seconds and I said "enough" so you might get "a lot of" hydrogen relative to your 9V battery example, but on an industrial scale you will not get enough hydrogen to make it a sustainable and profitable business.[/quote']

 

no, but im aware of the fact im making guesses. your assuming that there wont be enough produced and rejecting the idea because of it.

 

while one strike will definately not be enough to keep a business running, a lightning rod at the top of every skyscraper might be enough to be worth using in a supplementary way. solar panels on your roof arent enough to make a noticable dent in the big scheme of things, but if everyone did it we woudnt have much need for centralized electricity. (my teacher did this and his energy bill breaks even for the year)

[5614]

So now we need a lightning rod on top of all buildings, a water reserve under them, hydrogen and oxygen collecting tanks, people to collect that.

 

It just isn't practical.

 

Lightning isn't that common.

 

And if you think of electricity passing through a tank of water in a few micro seconds, it'll be hard to seperatly collect hydrogen and oxygen... although a method could be devised to bypass this problem.

 

It's just not practical.

[swansont]

put a lightning rod at the top of the highest skyscrapers' date=' but instead of grounding it, wire it to a chamber full of water with one plate (or piece of carbon?) at one side, hooked up to the rod, and another one on the other side grounded. hydrogen forms over one, oxygen over the other.

 

 

id call this one feasible (sp?). the only cost involved is lightning rods and chambers, thats not much. most towers already have lightning rods too.[/quote']

 

If you don't ground a lightning rod, does it still act as a lightning rod?

[Callipygous]

If you don't ground a lightning rod, does it still act as a lightning rod?

 

it is essentially grounded, it has water in the way though... thats a good question. will it still follow the wire as long as the rod is the highest thing?

[mmalluck]

You still have a problem with the building's structure.

 

The lightning rod / pool would have to have a many fold lower resistance to ground than the substructor of your building. Otherwise the lightning will arc through your building instead.

 

This simply won't happen. All large skyscrapers employ large steel piers driven far into the ground for support. With these there's no way to insulate the building from the ground.

 

Think about, the lightning travles across miles of open air, even if you could insulate the building in some manner, the lightning would just jump across your insulation.

 

Even if you could insulate the building from ground, your building would become something of a hazard. If for any reason your lightning rod / pool ground connection becomes severed, a direct lightning strike to the building will turn the building in a burning firecracker from hell.

[chatlack]

I think results cant be seen without experiment. Current , product , arc distance all need to be seen...

 

Some lightning bases(control centers) and one main pool can get this going I think. At least it must be tried...

[5614]

Where to build the tower? How long will you have to wait until it is hit by lightning?

[chatlack]

Tesla coil on a small model can teach something...

[jdurg]

You would also need to deal with the potential corrosion of the tower itself, unless you wanted to make the tower out of a non-oxidizing metal. To do that, it would cost an absolute fortune. The amount of fossil fuels you would need in order to erect and maintain those towers would completely eliminate any potential gain as well.

 

As has already been mentioned, the amount of energy in a bolt of lightning would take any water and vaporize it instantly. You can't electrolyze water in a controlled manner when it's in the form of a gas. With lightning, you also have to deal with the formation of ozone and nitrogen oxides in the general area where the lightning strikes. If you were to somehow get lightning to strike in the same general area over and over and over again, the levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides there would make it very unhealthy to be anywhere near it.

[rajama]

It may be a little late to butt-in on this thread, but this link may be useful:

http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/faculty/research/lightning/

 

5th paragraph mentions power levels of 10,000 megawatts but implies we have no precise knowledge of the energy available

[leo70]

to obtain hydrogen and oxygen from thunder:
1) take a pool full of water and salt (marine water)
2) on this pool place two domes (like two cups reversed) connected with storage systems
2) under each domes place an electrode that goes into the fluid
3) from the top of a dome and connected with the underlying electrode start a metallic wire that goes up in the sky supported by a balloon (like weather balloon)
4) from the top of the second dome a metallic wire goes in the ground

 

When a thunder hits the metallic wire starts the electrolitic reaction and under a dome there is oxygen production and under the second dome there is hydrogen,
the two elements goes stored in the storage system.

 

I don't think a plant like this should be able to reach the break even point (I mean economically) but could be intresting make a little test on reduced scale.

[Enthalpy]

Engineering is all about figures. Would you check the charge available from a bolt (or the energy, provided one can make the necessary voltage transformation and rectification) and tell us how much hydrogen is produced?

[John Cuthber]

If you pass an electric current through water about 1 to 1.5 volts is used in producing hydrogen. The rest- roughly a billion times as much if we are talking about a thunderbolt- is wasted as heat.

A typical lightning strike passes about 25 coulombs of electric charge.

that's enough to release 25/96000 moles of hydrogen atoms* or about 12.5/96000 moles of hydrogen gas.

About 0.0001 moles of hydrogen or about 2.5 mls of hydrogen gas.

 

Figure two here

http://gut.bmj.com/content/34/6/818.full.pdf

indicates that people fart more hydrogen than this massive undertaking could hope to produce.

Seeking to trap the energy from lightning isn't very practical in the first place- because power from other sources is cheap.

 

Seeking to do it by electrolysis has the slight problem of wasting something like 99.9999999% of the energy available.

Of course, you could address this by stacking about a billion electrolytic cells on top of each other. If each one is just 1cm thick (and that's probably reasonable, given the power dissipation- you don't want the cells vapourising). That gives a stack of cells ten million metres high.

 

* from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_constant

[Danijel Gorupec]

So, when we see lighting it means that we just saw electric energy being "wasted" (turned into heat, sound and light that cannot be easily collected).

 

So, we should avoid lighting to occur?

 

Instead, would it be better if we build an array of air ships (baloon) interconnect them with thin web of conductive (carbon) wires to collect charge, and anchor the whole structure the ground with some additional conducting wire. Would the current flow through the anchoring wire in some weather conditions?

[John Cuthber]

Why not just watch the pretty patterns it makes?

 

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

[leo70]

If you pass an electric current through water about 1 to 1.5 volts is used in producing hydrogen. The rest- roughly a billion times as much if we are talking about a thunderbolt- is wasted as heat.

OK, if you talk of heat what about thermolisys? May help in this case?

 

I like the idea of a net of balloon up in the sky so to be able to handle not normal thunder but smaller ones giving them the possibility to reach the ground easier, (without wait an amount of charge so big to generate the thunder). I think that this can generate a condition of "manageable power".

 

About the costs of power from other sources, we can't forget that fossil ones aren't endless

[John Cuthber]

If you pass an electric current through water about 1 to 1.5 volts is used in producing hydrogen. The rest- roughly a billion times as much if we are talking about a thunderbolt- is wasted as heat.

OK, if you talk of heat what about thermolisys? May help in this case?

 

I like the idea of a net of balloon up in the sky so to be able to handle not normal thunder but smaller ones giving them the possibility to reach the ground easier, (without wait an amount of charge so big to generate the thunder). I think that this can generate a condition of "manageable power".

 

About the costs of power from other sources, we can't forget that fossil ones aren't endless

OK, show me the maths.

[leo70]

From my point of view this case should be studied with scientific method. Do an empirical test, see what happen and analyse it to understand the dynamic of events. Again, my feeling is that this (admitted that works) will not be able to pay the costs, but who knows?

[Peter BE cimp]

If you wanted to store thunder energy that would be storing sound, lightning would be the electricity. If we could store sound energy, that would maybe be useful. But how much energy does sound produce, if any at all...?

[swansont]

Sound definitely produces energy, but it's not very much as compared to familiar processes. If you could perfectly store the sound energy from shouting, you would have to shout for (weeks or months, depending on the details) in order to heat up the water for a cup of coffee. 80 decibels of sound is only 1 milliwatt of power.

[Sensei]

Sound definitely produces energy, but it's not very much as compared to familiar processes. If you could perfectly store the sound energy from shouting, you would have to shout for (weeks or months, depending on the details) in order to heat up the water for a cup of coffee. 80 decibels of sound is only 1 milliwatt of power.

 

 

I am getting nearly 2.7 years.

~4.1855 J per 1 g H2O from 20 C -> 100 C = ~335 J * 250 grams of H2O in cup = ~84 kJ = 84 million seconds with 0.001 W = 969 days.

Correct?

Edited March 4, 2014 by Sensei

[swansont]

It depends on whether you use 80 decibels or something larger (since sound tends to drop with distance, sound loudness is often defined at some set distance from the source and distance to the cup isn't specified), how much water and how much you want to heat the water up. The fact that it's measured in (many) tens of days is the important thing for giving an order of magnitude to the problem. (i.e. it's 100 days give or take a factor of 10). The problem is not well-defined in terms of getting a precise answer.

 

Also, I'm seeing a conflict from whatever source I used for the 80 dB = 1 mW. Another source says that 0 dB = 1 picowatt, so it would be 90 dB = 1mW. Also, since the energy is derived from pressure, there's also a question of the area involved.

[J.C.MacSwell]

Sound definitely produces energy, but it's not very much as compared to familiar processes. If you could perfectly store the sound energy from shouting, you would have to shout for (weeks or months, depending on the details) in order to heat up the water for a cup of coffee. 80 decibels of sound is only 1 milliwatt of power.

So..tea it is then...

[Flexporian]

Yeah, except the lightning strike occurs for a few millionths of a second and we don't really know where exactly it is going to strike... so it'd be a tad hard! Hence Swansont's "just not practical".

 

- Perhaps a satellite to focus on an area of positive/negative Ions, condensed. Maybe with this we could "estimate" Lightning strikes however, being able to filter all the Amps and vaults and being able to "catch" the strike would be almost impossible. Luck and filters. That is the closest you would get. . .

Just my thoughts, soon, maybe someone will prove us wrong.

Edited March 10, 2014 by The_Architect