Capacitor to store lightning?

[phlogistician]

Your analogy isn't a very good one. There's a big difference between a mine and an electrical storm. Mines, whether they're looking for gold, silver, coal, uranium, diamonds, or any other commodity, have a limited supply of it.

And capacitors have a limited working lifespan, so they would need replenishing, and that adds costs to the ongoing maintenance of your system, which is kinda like going and finding a new seam in the mine, so the analogy is good enough.

 

[BennyF]

Wow, once a week! Now, you've been given the numbers on how much energy there is in a lightning bolt, so given these figures of one strike per week, and that amount of energy,... so _if_ you could capture all of that energy (but you can't) you'd be able to power a few lightbulbs. But not the elevators.

Wow, you're very quick to tell me what I can't do. Tell me, have you ever seen my schematics?

 

[BennyF]

And capacitors have a limited working lifespan, so they would need replenishing, and that adds costs to the ongoing maintenance of your system, which is kinda like going and finding a new seam in the mine, so the analogy is good enough.

No, the analogy isn't good enough. There's a big difference between looking for something that has a limited supply, like the gold in a gold mine, and looking for (and developing) a renewable resource like the electrical energy in lightning. No matter how expensive the gold is per ounce, there's still only a certain number of ounces in the ground in any one spot, and when it's gone, it's gone.

 

[phlogistician]

No matter how expensive the gold is per ounce, there's still only a certain number of ounces in the ground in any one spot, and when it's gone, it's gone.

And when your capacitors need replacing, they need replacing. Plus climate change could mean lightning stops striking where your apparatus is set up, and you'll have to 'mine' for lightning elsewhere.

 

[Billy T]

... Tell me, have you ever seen my schematics?

No, but I have seen your posts which reflect your total ignorance of the physics of electrical circuits. I tried to educate you a little about that so you would ceases thinking that a resistive divider string would work on lightning pulses the same way it works on DC here:

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2807227&postcount=525

But as you don't like the truth, prefer to remain totally ignorant of the subject you post on, you just ignore it and the post at above link.

 

[BennyF]

And when your capacitors need replacing, they need replacing.

Capital expenses are part of the business calculations made by every businessman. There's still a big difference between something with a limited supply, like the gold in a gold mine, and an energy source that shows up in the same places year after year.

Plus climate change could mean lightning stops striking where your apparatus is set up, and you'll have to 'mine' for lightning elsewhere.

Lightning has been seen in the same areas around the world for centuries. Nothing will change next year or the year after that to "stop" if from striking anywhere next year that it strikes this year.

 

[phlogistician]

Capital expenses are part of the business calculations made by every businessman. There's still a big difference between something with a limited supply, like the gold in a gold mine, and an energy source that shows up in the same places year after year.

Yes, as Gold becomes more rare, it's value INCREASES! LOL PWNED!

Lightning has been seen in the same areas around the world for centuries. Nothing will change next year or the year after that to "stop" if from striking anywhere next year that it strikes this year.

Ah, but you were implying a limitless supply. That may change before the gold runs out.

 

[BennyF]

Yes, as Gold becomes more rare, it's value INCREASES!

And there's still a limited supply of it, unlike lightning, which comes back to the same cities and towns year after year. The analogy between a gold mine and the extraction of electrical energy from lightning fails.

Ah, but you were implying a limitless supply. That may change before the gold runs out.

It "may" change? Based on what science? Something your Astrologer told you?

 

[phlogistician]

And there's still a limited supply of it, unlike lightning, which comes back to the same cities and towns year after year. The analogy between a gold mine and the extraction of electrical energy from lightning fails.

And as the commodity becomes harder to find, the price increases, which is A GOOD thing, what part of that eludes you?

It "may" change? Based on what science? Something your Astrologer told you?

Climate change affects weather patterns, did you not know this?

 

[Read-Only]

BennyF:

One thing that strikes me about all this is that you have something in common with N. Tesla besides just electricity. Prior to having mental problems later in life, he was a brilliant technical inventor. (And no, I'm not insinuating you have any mental problems, not even in the least.)

What the two of you share is having no mind for business/commercialism/economics. In particular, return on investment (ROI).

One of the best examples of Tesla's weakness in that area was his idea of transmitting wireless electricity around. Apparently, he'd given no thought as to how to bill for usage - even at a flat rate - or how to collect money from his customers. His grand scheme was to simply get it out there. And even if he had succeeded, it could have easily be "plucked from the air" by anyone who wanted it. A rough comparison could made between his concept and commercial radio/TV - except that he had no sponsors to pay for his operations.

Also, in your particular case, there are even more analogies to a mine that apply. Given that your initial start-up costs would be HUGE (just like a mine) and that your costs of maintaining the infrastructure would also be expensive (again, like a mine), your operation could be compared to dumping money down a hole in the ground - exactly like a failed mine.

I've not bothered to check the figures that were posted here. BUT if they are even anywhere near accurate, everything I've said above applies and you'd make FAR more money by just working at a job that pays minimum wage. :shrug:

 

[BennyF]

BennyF:

One thing that strikes me about all this is that you have something in common with N. Tesla besides just electricity. Prior to having mental problems later in life, he was a brilliant technical inventor. (And no, I'm not insinuating you have any mental problems, not even in the least.)

What the two of you share is having no mind for business/commercialism/economics. In particular, return on investment (ROI).

This reminds me of the story of a boy named Carl, sitting in a math class in Germany over a century ago. The teacher needed some time to assign grades to some papers that the class had recently turned in, so he told the class to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. As the other students started adding, Carl realized that pairs of numbers at opposite ends of the range would all add up to the same number, so he simply counted how many pairs there were and multiplied that by the total for each pair, thus arriving at the correct answer in a few minutes.

Carl Friedrich Gauss had so many achievements during his life that the unit of magnetic field was named for him. Was he commercially successful? No. Has he been remembered as an achiever? Yes.

One of the best examples of Tesla's weakness in that area was his idea of transmitting wireless electricity around. Apparently, he'd given no thought as to how to bill for usage - even at a flat rate - or how to collect money from his customers. His grand scheme was to simply get it out there. And even if he had succeeded, it could have easily be "plucked from the air" by anyone who wanted it. A rough comparison could made between his concept and commercial radio/TV - except that he had no sponsors to pay for his operations.

Also, in your particular case, there are even more analogies to a mine that apply. Given that your initial start-up costs would be HUGE (just like a mine) and that your costs of maintaining the infrastructure would also be expensive (again, like a mine), your operation could be compared to dumping money down a hole in the ground - exactly like a failed mine.

I've not bothered to check the figures that were posted here. BUT if they are even anywhere near accurate, everything I've said above applies and you'd make FAR more money by just working at a job that pays minimum wage. :shrug:

And I thought that Philogician was the only person in this thread who had forgotten what I said about my circuits.

What you and he both forgot was that neither one of you has ever seen them. i haven't posted them, I haven't said what components are in them, I haven't given any estimates of their cost, and I haven't described them in any way, so neither one of you can say with ANY certainty whether I'll be able to make a profit by setting it up.

Let me offer, as an alternative to the "brute force" cap bank, another circuit that I thought about and discarded early. This second idea is, in my opinion, workable from an electronics standpoint but far too uneconomical for any profit-minded businessman to consider.

I'm sure you're aware of the resistor divider concept, one I've mentioned here in this thread before. Let's say you have ten identical resistors wired in series. If you apply a voltage, either AC or DC, across the series, you will be able to measure 1/10th of this voltage across any one individual resistor.

Now let's scale up this concept, in two ways. Let's use the highest wattage resistors we can find and have all of them exposed to some sort of cooling process to absorb the heat they produce when in use. And let's add one more resistor to the series, one with a very low amount of resistance, so low that when the series has a voltage across it, the voltage that is measured across this new, low-ohmic resistor, wired in series with the rest, is a tiny fraction of the series. For easy reference, let's call this high-wattage, low-resistance resistor R11.

As an example of this concept, let's connect ten 100 M Ohm resistors in series (1 G Ohm total) and then specify that R11 is a 100 Ohm resistor, added to the series. The ratio of R11 to the series would be 100 ohms to 1 G Ohm + 100 Ohms, or approx 1-10,000,000. Whatever voltage was applied across the series, either AC or DC, R11 would only get 1/10,000,000th of it.

Now let's connect one end of the series to a lightning rod and the other end to an earth ground. This is just a theoretical exercise, remember. I discarded this idea quite early as a tremendous waste of voltage. Let's also connect a cap bank in parallel with R11, so that when the series resistors receive the voltage from the first lightning strike, R11 has only 1/10,000,000th of that voltage across it, and the cap bank can only be charged up to this relatively small amount of voltage.

Because of this fact, I would not need to have a series of capacitors in each of 1,000 branches to divide up the DC voltage. Each of the 1,000 branches would only need one cap in them, each one being charged up with whatever DC voltage is applied across this much-simplified current divider.

This arrangement, although already discarded as uneconomical, because so much of the voltage is lost as heat in the high-resistance part of the resistor divider, would clearly cost much less than a large-scale cap bank, like the kind I've been describing.

Now an electrical storm approaches the lightning rod. A 200 MV strike hits it and 200 MV of DC electricity is divided up among 11 high-wattage resistors. Ten of them convert the bulk of the electrical energy into heat, which goes into the cooling system mentioned earlier. The 11th resistor, named R11, has 200MV/10,000,000 or 20 volts across it, and the caps in the current divider, one cap in each of 1,000 branches, would only be charged up to 20 volts.

It would be ridiculously easy to give more voltage to the cap bank and waste less in the resistor divider. All you have to do is to specify that R11 has a higher resistance value compared to the other ten in the resistor divider. Or, if you wanted to make a more dramatic shift in the ratios, simply take one of the high-ohmic-value resistors completely out of the series, so that R11 is in series with only nine high-ohmic-value resistors.

One more time. The circuitry that I intend to send to the U.S. Government, as a formal application for a U.S. Patent, is different than what I've described here or anywhere else in this thread. The circuitry I just described is is only one more theoretical exercise, showing a possible method of converting the electrical energy in lightning into stored DC electricity, stored in a set of capacitors wired in parallel, one cap in each of 100 or 1,000 branches.

Benny, an admirer of Mr. Franklin

 

[phlogistician]

And I thought that Philogician was the only person in this thread who had forgotten what I said about my circuits.

When you came into this thread, you demonstrated a lack of understanding of how capacitors work, namely that they block DC current, and also held the opinion that an ammeter on the Earthed side of a capacitor would should current flow when a potential was applied across it, forgetting that a capacitor STORES charge because current DOES NOT PASS THROUGH IT, but REMAINS within the capacitor.

So as you do not understand the function of your components, how can what you have theoretically constructed function as theorised?

 

[BennyF]

Phil, the concepts are more important than you probably realize. Any circuitry that is assembled with a broken wire will "block" current from flowing in that wire. Capacitors behave differently. Any uncharged caps are charged up by any DC voltage that is applied across them, provided that this voltage is less than their rated voltage, and assuming that the cap is wired with the correct polarity, if you're using electrolytic caps.

 

[Billy T]

...is only one more theoretical exercise, showing a possible method of converting the electrical energy in lightning into stored DC electricity, stored in a set of capacitors wired in parallel, one cap in each of 100 or 1,000 branches.
Benny, an admirer of Mr. Franklin

No that is not possible. Lightning bolt produces lot of UV radiation which pre-ionize the air it will soon pass thru. That is how it can jump kilometers thru air from cloud to Earth. Even this pre-ionized air presents more resistance than a vertical copper wire with end well buried in the ground. -Why lightning rods save houses etc. I.e. the copper conductor to ground is a lower resistance path to ground than continuing the arc thru even pre-ionized air.

I.e. the lightning current ALWAYS takes the "path of least resistance" - that will not be your series string of "ten 100 M Ohm resistors in series (1 G Ohm total)" - not even one 10,000 ohm resister will have any current flowing thru it. The lightning will, as it always does, just take the path of lower resistance thru the UV pre-ionized air - at best passing near your resistors but certainly not thru them.

SUMMARY: your theoretical exercise is NOT possible, but does AGAIN show you have essentially ZERO understanding of what you post about.

This old post, which you ignore as you don't like the truth told: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2807227&postcount=525 showed that as well.

 

[BennyF]

First, let me say what a pleasure it is to correspond with someone who, unlike Phil, is willing to discuss concepts. I think he's only interested in being argumentative. The only company he could ever run would only have one employee in it - himself, and he'd be constantly fighting with all of his customers, suppliers, and government regulators. His company wouldn't last a month.

As far as the "path of least resistance" goes, well, I think that would depend on the design and placement of the lightning rod in this theoretical exercise. A lightning rod that's made of wood and located a foot above the ground in the middle of a city filled with skyscrapers wouldn't stand a chance of being hit with anything but pigeon poop. A well-designed and well-placed lightning rod, however, should be able to "attract" a strike and give its' voltage to whatever it's attached to.

 

[Billy T]

... A well-designed and well-placed lightning rod, however, should be able to "attract" a strike and give its' voltage to whatever it's attached to.

Yes that is true; however the "whatever it's attached to" can only have a few ohms impedance to ground, otherwise the lightning will just arc to ground thru the pre-ionized air around the "whatever." If you have a tall, vertical metal rod the lightning very well may hit the top of it and travel down it to the point where your network of dividers and connection wires lead off to your capacitor bank. At that point the lightning will resume its air arc to ground as the impedance of that short path will be less than the inductance of your connector network, and orders of magnitude less than passing thru a voltage divider string made of meg-ohm resisters.

As you are so ignorant of the physics of electrical circuits you may not understand that "impedance", Z, is the complex addition of resistance, R, and inductance L. I.e. Z^2 = R^2 + L^2

For the frequencies in very brief duration lightning pulse and wiring network connecting to many physically large condensers, L will normally greatly exceed* R. I.e. L >> R but you ignore it as you falsely think that if component is called a "resister" (or a "capacitor") it's L is zero as it nearly is for DC currents.

To borrow a common phrase, in you discussions you have thrown the "L baby" out with the wash.
Or in short you are totally ignorant of the subject you post about.

--------------------
* Recall as I tried to teach you in post 525, that L is a function of current path geometry ONLY. Your array / bank of many condensers will cover many square meters - perhaps even a 1000 (is a large geometry). Even if there were no "resisters" in your "divider string" the L at lightning pulse duration frequencies would make no current flow into the condensers as the pre-ionized air path to ground (only about the height of the condensers in length) would be the "path of least resistance." That you also expect the lightning current to flow thru a resister divider string does give me a good laugh. Thanks for that.

 

[phlogistician]

First, let me say what a pleasure it is to correspond with someone who, unlike Phil, is willing to discuss concepts. I think he's only interested in being argumentative.

There's no argument. Capacitors block DC. The lightning is not going to find it an attractive path, because it ISN'T a path to Earth.

 

[Billy T]

BennyLet me tell some personnel experience I have had many years ago with lightning jumping around high impedance sections of insulators in a steel cable – the guy wires of a radio transmitter’s antenna. The chief engineer of radio WCHS was a patient and friend of my MD father and knew me well, especially the fact that I had amateur radio station W8IJM and was a good student, etc.

He had problem keeping WCHS manned 24/7 with only four full time licensed (commercial broadcast license) engineers, when they took their two week vacations. (8 weeks every summer - expensive overtime pay to the three remaining.) He told me and my dad that if I could pass the FCC’s First class commercial broadcast engineer's license test (about four hours long and not easy) that he would pay me the same pay as his adult engineer for at least those 8 weeks. I studied and passed on the first try to become the youngest First class FCC certified commercial broadcast license engineer in the US. As there were many points in the station with lethal voltage and high currents and I was only 14, the state of W.VA.’s child labor laws blocked my working there for few winter months, but eventually the fact that the FCC said I was fully qualified, prevailed. (Perhaps a bribe was paid - I don't know.) To a 14 year old kid, I earned a fortune that next summer and several following summers. I kissed my paper route good bye and spent my time after school in the library.

Now to the point about lightning. Many times every summer storm lightning would hit the tall towers (WCHS had three as it was very powerful and had to have nulls in it radiation pattern to not interfere with a few other distant US stations on the same low frequency. The low frequency, 580Khz, required that the towers be very tall for efficient radiation.) Being the engineer in charge is a very boring job. I read a lot of books on the job, but during storms I watched the lighting strikes. The metal tower sat on large glass insulators so to get to ground the lightning almost always ran down the guy wires. They were divided at many places to have conductive sections much shorter than the station’s broadcast wave length (Not to steal / absorb energy that we wanted to radiate).

Most of the time the lightning bolt was visible only as an air arc of not more than a foot long as it jumped over and around the ceramic insulators breaking up the guy wires, but occasionally it was 10 or more feet long on the lower side of the insulator. I.e. the current did not rejoin the guy wire, but found the air path near the wire (which the necessary arc over the insulator had pre-ionized) to be less resistive than the steel wire. Very interestingly, this long air arc was not straight, but curled around the wire. To this day I don’t fully understand this. Surely it must have been caused by some dynamic magnetic interaction between the air arc current and some unseen current traveling in the guy wire.

SUMMARY: Your “whatever” attached to the bottom of your lightning rod tower must have less impedance to ground than a very heavy steel guy wire which is well anchored, deep in the earth. There is no way any current will flow into your capacitor bank when the path around them to ground is only as long as the capacitor is tall and that air is pre-ionized by the UV from other parts of the air arc. I have already explained the theory of this sad fact for your dreams, and now give you real historic examples of lighting jumping around a heavy steel cable instead of traveling in the cable.

 

[Read-Only]

I'll add an addendum to Billy's post and mention something about lightening that few un-indoctrinated people are aware of.

First a wee bit of my background: I worked for the then-largest telecommunications company in the world - AT&T. Lightening protection was a part of my job which involved microwave radio relay stations (and towers) and buried long-distance cables.

The protection for the equipment in the radio stations was fairly simple and straightforward. Since it was microwave system, the signal was carried in waveguides - rectangular and circular were both employed, made of high-copper brass and well grounded themselves. In addition, the square tower itself was grounded at the base of each leg by a 12-foot, 2-inch diameter solid copper rod driven into the ground.

There was a security fence (heavy-gauge woven wire - sometimes called "chain link") to keep people from climbing the towers around the tower yard. And though you might think that was more than ample protection it actually wasn't. When the ground was very dry (weeks without rain), the bolt would sometimes leap from the tower structure to the fence - even when the path straight down the tower was shorter. That was because the dry ground was a higher-resistance path than it was for the bolt to jump through the already partly ionized air and connect with the fence. The blast would burn off some of the galvanized coating on the steel fence - which then quickly start to rust and required the frequent replacement of sections.

And buried cable is an entirely different story. And this is also where that unusual fact about lightening comes into play.

To begin with, the cable is naturally grounded because it's covered with a lead sheath which, of course, is placed directly in the ground. And since it IS so well grounded, it will sometimes attract a direct strike even though there my be tall trees nearby. And lightening does not always strike a single, individual target but can and will hit several different ones as it often breaks into "forks" while connecting.

In addition to the copper wires in the cables, the ones of that time period also contained coaxial pairs for long-distance service. And here comes that kicker I mentioned. Rather than hitting the cable and then being immediately absorbed by the surrounding earth, It will often run along the cable for some distance. And due to the fact that lightening has a "ringing" property at times, it will flatten (crush) the coax at specific intervals (due to the frequency of the bolts) for considerable distances at times.

The main thrust of Billy's post and this one is to demonstrate the role resistance plays when it comes to dealing with lightening. It requires a pretty well uneducated/ inexperienced person to ignore those facts and think they can channel it to wherever they want it to go - *especially* along a path that includes built-in resistance!

 

[Billy T]

benny Here is a quick crude summary of posts 578 and 579:

Lightning is 5 ton gorilla which does what it wants to, not what you hope it would do. It ain’t never going to climb into your condenser bank thru your resistive divider chains and the inductance of the connection wire network to an array of large condensers.