Capacitor to store lightning?
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I have some bad news for you. The text of any patent that is not covered by security procedures is available for public inspection online. I've seen the text of every patent in the class and subclass that I believe my patent will go into. Nobody has patented it already.
Oh, and you may not have seen the post I left, saying that even if somebody has already patented a large-scale cap bank, my circuit diagrams (the ones I'll send to the patent office) include other features that I haven't told anyone about.
Capacitors do block DC currents. They only pass changing currents driven by changing voltages. DC is not normally considered to be a changing voltage but does change when turned on or off, like connecting up a battery or removing it from a circuit. Hook as big a capacitor as you like in series with the battery of your car and try to start it, if you think it will conduct DC. Is there no limit to your ignorance?
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On second thought, perhaps this thread can be useful. Cetainly not to educated Benny with his closed mind, but for Paul W. Dixon. He has a Ph.D.in psychology and may have been doing an experiment on us with his thread (See it at: http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2510456&postcount=1887) like Benny, Paul does not respond to questions or learn from other's posts, but now that the LHC has run for a more than a week without destroying the Earth, Paul has fallen silent. Perhaps Paul can join this thread and explore Benny's psychology which blindly plunges ahead in ignorance with his dreams.
He wouldn't have filed for a US patent in 1752, now would he?
Not unless he had also invented a time machine.
http://www.myoutbox.net/popch02.htm
Billy, I offer a sincere apology. In a DC circuit, a capacitor will absorb the DC voltage up to its' voltage rating. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I do remember being told by my teachers that they will "pass" an AC current by means of repetitive charging and discharging cycles. In a DC circuit, a capacitor simply charges once, up to its' voltage rating, as I said.
My mind isn't closed. I'm open to new ideas, including your suggestions of the dire economic consequences if I build my cap bank now, which I'm not planning on doing until I receive my patent, of course.
Go on, keep telling me about today's low electricity prices and high cap prices!
Now I know what I was thinking. I was thinking about the closing prices of some of my stocks, which are up today and this week. I do a bit of juggling from time to time.
Benny
Don't give up on the juggling.
Like I said, a capacitor blocks DC current, and you don't have a clue about electronics in reality.
On your patent, well, if you had a good idea, a really novel, patentable idea, I don't understand why you haven't patented it already.
Given that I linked to existing research in th efield, and that the original researcher sold his idea, I doubt that was bought without some patent protection.
Of course, I know that the texts of patents are availble free online, I linked to the patent web site FFS!
And you might also notice, that once patent laws were established, no wise ass was successfully granted the patent to the wheel. Pre-existing, public domain ideas are not patentable it appears.
Given that storing charge from lightning strikes is public domain, you are going to have to perform some linguistic gymnastics with your patent, given that you don't yet have a working prototype.
On working prototypes; othes do have them, you are behind the game.
Oh for christ's sake, you are now saying you can measure a potential difference in a short circuit!
THINK FOR A MINUTE! Eiter side of a capacitor, is a piece of wire, a conductor, a short circuit, one side held at zero volts, on the earth side. You are trying to tell me a current passes from one side of the short circuit, to the other, with no potential difference?
Your understanding of electronics is fundamentally flawed. You need to revisit Kirchoff's laws.
BennyF - You seem to be pinning your hopes for economic viability on a rise in the cost of electricity. First I note it has been going steadily down in real terms for more than 50 years as larger and more efficient generation has become the norm. The Chinese are now building "super heated steam" power plants which get nearly 50% more energy from each ton of coal. (Coal is the US's main fuel for electric power too.) Also, the US is now resuming building nuclear plants - they make power much cheaper from Uranium.
But let’s ignore these trends and facts and assume that the cost of electricity increases 500% in the two years you are waiting for your patent to issue. That would change the economic analysis I did for you in post 272 and make it take only a little more than 100,000 years before you recovered your invested capital. A 500% increase electric cost will cut your interest payments down to "only" 4,408 times $27,000,000 = 119,016,000,000 dollars while you are working towards the capital recovered time point. You do have more than 100 billion in pocket change to pay the interest when due until your capital is recovered, do you not? If not, your debt will grow as will the total interest. (They add unpaid interest to the outstanding capital debt, plus a penalty usually.)
Did you find some error in the analysis of post 272? There are some. For example, I did assume in the above calculation of the total interest that you could borrow at 3% for half a billion years. That is silly when the US government is paying 4% to borrow for only10 years. In several other ways I made very generous assumptions to reduce the cost of your plan.
But as I said there, in post 272, focus on getting the patent and avoid any consideration of the economics or you might get discouraged.
Remember: "Ignorance is your strong point" - don't learn - that will just weaken you.
I.e. keep the cart before the horse as you have been doing.
P.S. The very last thing you should do is to learn the basic facts about capture of electrical energy from a very brief duration source and storage of it in capacitors.
(E.g. that capacitors and wires have inductance that limits how fast their currents can change, air's dielectric strength, polarization lags in capacitor's dielectric, etc.)
But let’s ignore these trends and facts and assume that the cost of electricity increases 500% in the two years you are waiting for your patent to issue. That would change the economic analysis I did for you in post 272 and make it take only a little more than 100,000 years before you recovered your invested capital. A 500% increase electric cost will cut your interest payments down to "only" 4,408 times $27,000,000 = 119,016,000,000 dollars while you are working towards the capital recovered time point. You do have more than 100 billion in pocket change to pay the interest when due until your capital is recovered, do you not? If not, your debt will grow as will the total interest. (They add unpaid interest to the outstanding capital debt, plus a penalty usually.)
Did you find some error in the analysis of post 272? There are some. For example, I did assume in the above calculation of the total interest that you could borrow at 3% for half a billion years. That is silly when the US government is paying 4% to borrow for only10 years. In several other ways I made very generous assumptions to reduce the cost of your plan.
But as I said there, in post 272, focus on getting the patent and avoid any consideration of the economics or you might get discouraged.
Remember: "Ignorance is your strong point" - don't learn - that will just weaken you.
I.e. keep the cart before the horse as you have been doing.
P.S. The very last thing you should do is to learn the basic facts about capture of electrical energy from a very brief duration source and storage of it in capacitors.
(E.g. that capacitors and wires have inductance that limits how fast their currents can change, air's dielectric strength, polarization lags in capacitor's dielectric, etc.)
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Your posts are getting personal and provocative. I'm not here to argue with anyone, and that includes you. This board (and this website) is about ideas, including mine. If you keep trying to attack me personally, I'm going to begin ignoring you, and I think others will also, because I've been offering ideas and discussing the ideas that others offer, as opposed to simply mudslinging.
If you want to discuss my ideas intelligently, you're welcome to do so. If, however, you'd rather act like a spoiled child when somebody else has something that you don't (an original idea, for instance), then you will be treated like a spoiled child.
I do have an original idea, which is required by the patent laws, and I haven't patented it yet because this is my first patent application, and I want to get it right.
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First, Billy, it's "BennyF, not BennyR, in my deep and longlasting respect and honor of Mr. Franklin, so let me get that out of the way right now.
Second, in accordance with a post I left for you way back on page 13, let's ignore the economics completely until I get word that the U.S. Government has decided that my patent application has all the right stuff.
Third, for the purposes of a serious discussion of electricity, two adjacent wires that don't touch each other can't short out, no matter how much voltage is in the wires, and no matter how much current flows through the wires unless one wire has a much larger VOLTAGE POTENTIAL than the other.
The cap bank I have in mind will store a lot of voltage, but each pair of wires will have caps physically arranged so that any two adjacent wires will have a similar voltage potential. This will ensure that there will be no short-circuit through empty air.
Sorry about the R instead of F. They are next to each other on keyboard and I am somewhat dyslexic so read what should be there -did not notice.
You are correct correct -there will be no short between metal surfaces at the same potential, even if it is a million volts. I was referring to (and think I said but am too lazy to check) an arc to ground, which need not be literally the ground but just near zero potential.
Lightning routinely arcs thru a kilometer of air, so near your capacitor, even if already traveling down a copper strap to it, it can still (and very likely will if the capacitor has too much inductance) leap back into the air - arc to ground instead of try to pump charge into your capacitor.
In some post many pages back I told of my first job (after paper boy) as an FCC certified first class commercial broadcast engineer working at Radio WCHS. That was then, may still be, the most power radio class in the US had except for the "clear channel" stations.
WCHS has three tall towers, with phase of currents in them controlled to put "notches" in the radiated field in the directions of the two other distant stations also on that same frequency. Thus, every strong electrical storm had a good chance of hitting us with at least one bolt of lightning.
What I told before is the job is boring so I normally would watch the towers during storms. - On many occasions I saw lightning jump the ceramic compression insulators that divided the guy wires up into segments short compared to our wavelength. - Usually the lighting arc was not much longer than the insulator as the current immediately returned to the guy wire but on occasion it did not return for many meters. I.e. instead of traveling down a steel wire as big as your little finger, it just stayed in the air as an arc less less than 6 inches from the wire.
I don't know (or yet understand for sure) why, but usually when it did this, the air arc would make two or more turns around the wire. I tried hard to determine if it was clock or counter clockwise rotation*, but my depth perception was not adequate. All I could be sure of was the nearly continuous curving image of the flash "burned" into my retina had small breaks in it when the arc was behind the wire.
Every since watching the lightning CHOOSE to travel down thru air instead on a heavy wire only inches away, I have had a great deal of respect for lightning's ability to chose it's path to ground. There is little reason to think much current will flow into your capacitors, even if they are expensive low inductance units. Most of the current will just by-pass them and air arc to ground.
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*That, combined with knowledge of the local magnetic field of the Earth -Its component perpendicular to the wire, could have let me rule out (or believe in) the
(qV) X B force as why the arc was curling around the wire. I know this is way beyond you, but others may be interested.
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I've been trying to design a system in my mind that could store energy from a lightning bolt, like Benny proposes..and this is one stumbling block I can't overcome and find a solution for.
Benny's system would start with a lightning rod to collect the bolt. That lightning rod would need to be connected by some conductor to the first part of his current/voltage divider circuit. At that point, though, the voltage in the "main input lead" delivering the current to the circuit would still be at 100's of thousands or even millions of volts. Since Benny's circuit would have at least some DC resistance and inductance...I can't figure out how you would keep the voltage carried by "main input lead" to the circuit from just arcing to ground.
From a straight wire going directly down into the ground it would rarely, if ever, jump to ground in an air arc. Lightning rods do work – They save houses etc.
In the case of lightning coming down the radio tower guy wires I described, those guy wires are not continuous wires. There are ceramic insulators periodically in them. Both wires at an insulator end in loops - sort of like when you join the forefinger to thumb to make a loop and that loop of the right hand can be interlocking your two hands together with a similar loop of the left hand. Do this and then imagine there is some ceramic inside both loops keeping the skin of right hand from touching the skin of the left hand. If you try to pull your hands apart you will compress that ceramic and the two hands need not touch, yet carry a large tensile load.
Ceramic, glass & concrete under compression are very strong and can be as strong as the guy wire. In tension these brittle materials would snap. This is the way two guy wires are connected to carry a load and yet not touching. The few inches separation between the wires is nothing to lightning voltage so it arcs over - usually immediately reattaching to the far side wire. Then all you see is a "dot flash" of light at the insulator. Strangely, the air arc once formed does not always return to the very close wire going further downward. The conductivity of the air arc plasma may be greater and / or the arc current’s interaction with the magnetic field of part of the discharge which is still in the wire can cause it to stay in the air.
For you to guide lightning current into a capacitor that must be the lowest impedance (note I did not say "resistance")* path available to the discharge. If the air nearby is already ionized that may be very hard to achieve but should be possible with low inductance capacitors if the current has not already formed an air arc. If the inductance of the capacitor is significant on these short time scales, and it may be, then some current will flow into the capacitor but it cannot instantly step up to a large value from zero. I.e. considerable voltage will develop across the inductance trying to rapidly increase the current. That voltage can be large enough to initiate and air arc. If it does, and you have already achieved some charge stored in the capacitor before the air arc starts, then the charge in the capacitor may just dump to ground via the air arc too or do so after the lightning current is basically over, sustaining the air arc a little longer.
Frankly I don't know what would happen - lighting seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to finding the path it likes to ground. The problem is not impossible, just not very amenable to engineering design - a lot of experimental work would be required to get much energy both into the capacitor and to keep it there (no subsequent arcing), especially if arc UV (or even soft X-rays) have been ejecting electrons from metals into the air nearby any high voltage points. That is why I suspect that most of these high voltage point would need to be covered with dielectric oil - to "soak up" (atomically attach making heavier negative ions) the photo-ejected electrons. If there are any free electrons and the electrics field on them are large they can liberate others from air molecules and start arcs even at atmospheric pressure, but then large fields are required.
SUMMARY: Playing around with lightning and trying to store its energy is an experimental art, not yet a quite a science, and certainly not achieved by simple minded circuit diagrams drawn on paper, but having an understand of some of the related physic sure would help.
The main reason why not to even try to capture and store lightning energy is economic, not that it is physically impossible. Periodically companies do get formed and try to get investors to give them money, but as far as I am concern, all I have ever read about are just scams, skirting the edge of fraud. Sort of like those ads promising to double your gas mileage with some simple device they stick in the carburetor (before fuel injected cars were so common).
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*Impedance is always larger than just the resistive component if not balanced out by capacitance and that is only possible at one frequency – the LC resonate frequency. At high frequencies (short period oscillations) or very brief current pulses, the inductance will dominate.
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No, it's just your ego is taking a knock, because you are getting your ignorance pointed out to you. It's not personal, because I don't care about you, personally. All I care about is correcting your bad science, so others won't read it and think you are correct.
I don't see people ignoring me because of you, so that's just your ego popping up again. What I see is everyone telling you 'your' idea is bogus, technically, and financially.
I did, I used my intelligence and exposed your ignorance about capacitors blocking DC current.
You think you have an original idea, despite the fact that many others have tried the same thing. More ego.
I do have an original idea, which is required by the patent laws, and I haven't patented it yet because this is my first patent application, and I want to get it right.[/QUOTE]
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