Capacitor to store lightning?

It should, but with wind, may to too hard to make it go towards the cloud.

 

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Also, for experimental purposes they like to know more or less exactly when the lightning is going to hit. With a rocket, the lightning is going to strike within a few seconds of it launching, or not at all. With a balloon floating around in the sky, you never really know when it's going to strike.

 

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Normally, yes, but the following link shows what I was talking about.

http://www.wstestsystems.com/eis3.htm

Four of the caps on the page have voltage ratings of 140 KV, two are rated at 100 KV, and the last two have ratings of 200 KV and 300 KV. All but the last two are shaped like a cylinder, with two electrodes, one at each end of the cylinder. They remind me of the shape of a cigar.

I have seen a catalog from a different capacitor manufacturer, who also offers caps with voltage ratings up to 200 KV, and various capacitance ratings.

I thank you for the information you provided recently on arcing and dielectric strength.

Benny

 

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While those caps are rated at 140KV...take a look at the capacitance. If you want to calculate the energy in Joules that it could hold, try this: E=1/2 * V^2 * C

From my calculations...that around 500 Joules per cap...so you'd need 100 million of them to store 500MJ.

In addition..you would also have the added cost of electrical isolation:

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Hello Administrators !

I just tried to upload an avatar into my profile, but I could not do it. Am I disallowed this privilege, or am I clicking the wrong buttons?

Benny

 

Yes electrodes at both ends, often sticking thru a glass or ceramic insulation disk are quite common for small capacitors, but not for high voltage energy storage capacitors. You do understand that 20nF and 42 nF are very small values, nano, not micro farads. As MacGyver points out you would need 100 million of them to store, fully charged, 500MJ.

They are not used to store energy, but mainly in the near discharged state hung across a pair of wires that might get a very brief, but high voltage spike across them to protect down steam device from the high voltage spike. Judging from the stated weights, 20 &42Kg, I would guess their volumes at least 25 & 50 liters (100 million of them then 2.5 & 5 billion liters. It might be more informative for you in cubic feet. (1 liters = 0.0353146667 cubic feet). E.g. 50 liters is 1.765,733,335 cubic feet. So 50 billion of these is 1,765,733,335 cubic feet. Now a cubic mile is (5280)^3 cubic feet or 278784x5280 < 279x528E4 = 1,473,120,000 so your are speaking of more than a cubic mile large storage system for storing 500MJ when only working at 140Kv.

Recall from my prior post that to store the SAME energy at a voltage a thousand times greater, you need 1000 times more volume. Thus even if you were speaking of only storing at 140Million volts you would need significantly more than 1000 cubic miles for your storage system.* Your planned 100 billion volt system would occupy about a billion cubic miles if made with these nano Farad capacitors.

When I said your storage system might fit inside a dielectric oil tank whose base area was the size of Manhattan Island and whose side walls were "miles high," I was assuming you would use many individual capacitors in the tens of micro Farad range, not in the nano Farad range. The energy storage to volume ratio of these capacitors of your link is much less than those bigger units several posters have shown photos of.

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*Let me explain the physics of this to you: Just as the energy in a compressed steel spring is stored by slightly compressing the equilibrium inter atomic spaces between atoms, the energy stored in a capacitor is by compressing the space between dielectric atoms. In both cases there is a structural break down limit. Thus, if you want to store twice as much energy at just below this limit you will need twice the amount of storing material (dielectric or steel).

If you also want to store the energy at twice the voltage, then the plates of a simple capacitor must be twice a far apart (to keep the electric field below the breakdown field). This will reduce the capacitance by a factor of two. However the stored energy is 0.5C V^2 so the V^2 factor is 4 times greater and the C factor is half as large. Thus the energy stored is in fact doubled with twice the volume stressed to near the dielectric limit.

 

It might be too big.
Save a google image thumbnail as a .jpg and try that.
Give this one a try. Right click and save as jpg.
Then upload it to your profile.

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Captain, I have a drawing of Mr. Franklin flying a kite, with lightning in the background. It's just under 70KB, and I think it's perfect for my screen name. It's currently in the GIF format, but I can convert it into JPG format (or TIFF, or BMP, or a dozen others) if I need to.

I still have a few questions that you may be able to answer.

#1. Is there a required image format for an avatar?

#2. Is there a limit on the image size?

#3. What is the procedure for uploading it?

#4. Am I allowed to install an avatar under the board rules? I ask this question because I had to post, I think, 20 posts before I could add links, so there may be restrictions on me that I'm not aware of.

 

It has to be no bigger than 60x60 pixels and no larger than 19.5kb. Under "user CP" you should see an "edit avatar" under "settings".

 

If I remember my prefixes, a deci- is a tenth, a milli- is a thousanth, a micro- is the next level smaller, a pico-farad would be the next level smaller (a thousandth of a pico-farad), and I guess a nano-farad would be the next level smaller, a thousandth of a pico-farad. Do I have it right?

A screwdriver isn't "made" to be a replacement for a prybar, but it sometimes is used for just that purpose. Even if a 140 KV cap isn't made for the purpose of storing lightning's voltage, why can't it be used for this purpose?

It seems I've been confused about what is being "used" in a circuit. A long time ago, I was shown the principles in a simple circuit consisting of a battery, a light bulb, and a knife switch. The battery produced voltage which the light bulb turned into light by being a resistive element. Ever since, I have thought in terms of voltage being "used up". There is even some DC voltage loss in wires themselves, I was taught, which is why Nicola Tesla's invention of AC was so important. It enabled the transmission of electricity with a much smaller loss of the voltage which would later be turned into light, heat, and other residential purposes.

I graduated 30 years ago from an electronics trade school. I learned about basic electricity principles before being taught electronics. I learned how to use current dividers and voltage dividers. I learned about RC and LC circuits
and after graduating, was hired as an electronics technician just as the recession of 1980 was getting bad. My company was laying people off left and right, and eventually, I lost my job as well. Since those jobs require a frequent refresher course in the new chips, and since I didn't have a job anymore, I couldn't keep up my electronics education, and so I couldn't get rehired.

However, I could and did keep my textbooks, and I could and did remember most of the principles and practices I had learned. That's what I was like in the summer of 2006, when the idea came to me. Lightning is high voltage and high current. Treat it like any other source of electricity, and find a way to store it!

Along the way, I discovered a few quirks, like the existence of positively-charged lightning bolts, coming from the tops of the clouds, and the difficulty of predicting where it will strike.

Fortunately for me, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has made this job a lot easier. They divide the continental US into six regions, and each link below shows the probability of lightning striking in one of those regions.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/NE_probltg.gif
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/NC_probltg.gif
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/NW_probltg.gif
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/SE_probltg.gif
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/SC_probltg.gif
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/radar/SW_probltg.gif

My original idea involved some simple concepts, some HV wiring and capacitors, and a few tricks to ensure that my storage equipment could not get hit twice during the same electrical storm, thus overloading the caps with twice as much voltage before I would have a chance to draw down the voltage at my own pace.

Earlier in this thread, I said I wanted to store a hundred billion volts. Doing so would necessarily mean that the components in my storage equipment, including the wires themselves, would only need to handle a small fraction of the peak amperage which I understand is approximately 100 KA.

Even 3/0 wire, like the spool in the following link, might not be able to handle it. That's why I upped the voltage and reduced the amperage.

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/ww...ol&op=search&Ntt=wire 3/0|spool&sst=subset&N=

It seems I'll have to go back for that refresher course now.

Thank you to all who have helped educate me.

Benny

 

milli is "thousandth" or 10^-3
micro is "millionth" or 10^-6
nano is "billionth" or 10^-9
pico is "trillionth" or 10^-12

You had nano and pico swapped.

 

1. Not sure. I've always saved it as a jpg file
2. Yes. The maximum size of your custom image is 60 by 60 pixels or 19.5 KB (whichever is smaller). The google thumbnails all seem to work ok.
3. Edit avatar under the CP menu
4. I Don't know.

Try one of these to test. You can change your avatar as often as you like.

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That is the origin of all your mistakes. It is the chemical energy in the battery that is "used up," not the voltage. As you thought voltage was being used up and knew it was possible to step up the voltage, you thought you could get more energy (Even than existed in the source) by stepping up the voltage to 100 billion volts and using a little bit of the voltage at a time to produce hydrogen much more cheaply or to disconnect office buildings from the power lines.

Both batteries and capacitors can store energy and have a terminal voltage; however they have very different relationships between the terminal voltage and the fraction of the energy remaining in the storing unit. E.g. When 3/4 of the energy in a new battery has been "used up" the terminal voltage is essential the same as when the battery was new. In the capacitor when 3/4 of the originally stored energy is used up the terminal voltage is only half of what it was originally.

This is another reason why batteries (or fuel cells, which are "batteries" that permit the chemical energy to be feed in from an external source) are better for the primary energy storage in an electric car. Motors tend to over heat and burn up if you only give them half of their design voltage. Thus, either you can only use less than about half the energy stored in a capacitor to power the car's motor without damage to it OR you must provide electronics, which can handle the peak load, that will take a variable input DC voltage and make a essentially constant output DC voltage. I.e. include a high power level capable DC voltage regulator, which accepts variable voltage DC input in your power system (more expense and weight).

PS
One can define a "battery" as any device which DIRECTLY converts chemical energy into electrical energy. "Directly" is require to avoid inclusion of oil and coal fired power plants etc. as batteries. They, with the aid of their additional equipment, also convert their chemical energy into electric power. That would be my definition, but many people may not like my calling fuel cells "batteries."

 

HOLD THE PRESSES !![There's a MAJOR electrical storm moving through Iowa RIGHT NOW.

http://www.iowaponds.com/images/weather/nexstorm.jpg

I"ll get back to storing electricity later. Right now, all I want to do is to STARE AT IT.

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Benny/FONT]

 

Well?

 

For those who logged in too late to see the show ...

A serious electrical storm, viewed from a lightning detector in Waterloo, Iowa.

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Strike Star, counting 14 lightning strikes PER MINUTE in their North Central sector.

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I feel somewhat like a tornado chaser, except that I can do my chasing from a computer.

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Benny

 

Sorry folks, my image upload didn't work. I have a few dozen web addresses on file. Each one is a scan for lightning strikes. Yesterday, when I checked the six NOAA links that I had published recently, one of them told me that there was a big electrical storm in the Iowa-Illinois area. I downloaded current information from a bunch of them yesterday, and a moment ago, I tried to upload to this board two of the scans, but all I could display was the path to the image, not the image itself. Oh, well. It was an excellent show while it lasted.

 

You can't link files directly from your computer. You need to host them on the internet somewhere, then link that address. I use photobucket.com to store my images online. It's free. If you need any help, let me know.

and it's a fuck-load safer!

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Thanks, Captain, for the image of Mr. Franklin.

Benny

 

MacGyver, I just registered with Photo Bucket, like you recommended and I've saved onto their website the two images that I tried to upload earlier. Here goes my first try at uploading them onto this message board.

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Even if it doesn't work this time, I'll try it again a bit later, and thanks anyway, for the advice to register with Photo Bucket.

Benny, crossing my fingers