Capacitor to store lightning?

[Captain Kremmen]

Well, I've given quite a bit of detail about my LightningBoltCatcher (Copyright).
In fact I think you are after more details just so you can get all these $10 fees yourself.

It's only fair we hear more about your HLL (copyright) system.

As for reading the whole of posts of more than three paragraphs. No, but I did read quite a lot of it.

 

[Billy T]

Read the footnote of post 318 -it is the most valuable part for you at least. Main text is just another wasted effort to educate Benny. Often the ends ofmy long posts are the best parts - Sort of a reward for those few who read that far.

.. It's only fair we hear more about your HLL (copyright) system. ...

OK. Most people think that to copyright some term(s) names, etc. you need to apply to the USPTO. That may have been true years ago, I do not know, but now is not.

All you need to do is to be sure to always display that little "c" inside the circle WHENEVER you use your term (or as you and I have done) state that the term is copyrighted. It is impossible to draw a sharp line between words that are in common use and newly created terms, so even if you do always display the circled c, you may not have an enforcible in court copyright on it. Now I think the main utility of seeking a copyright from the USPTO is that if granted, it tends to increase your chance of enforcing your right to exclusively use it.
Some word letter symbols, like FreeSex may have considerable commercial value and be unique, but still will not be enforcable in court for your exclusive use.

PS: I intentionally understood you to be asking about the copyright mechanism (not the HLL catcher mechanisms) - I am no fool - I know you are just trying to trick me into telling more about the HLL catcher so you can beat me to the patent office - I am at a disadvantage as I live in Brazil and even air mail takes a few days. Benny said that I could apply electronically via the internet, but probably there are traps that will catch my great idea along the way, change the name on the application, and I will be screwed (in a different way than I planned.)

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Benny, you've gone missing for a day.
I hope you aren't trying to patent my invention

 

[phlogistician]

Benny, you've gone missing for a day.
I hope you aren't trying to patent my invention

He probably got struck by lightning. More likely than him being struck by a good idea !!

 

[BennyF]

That's the thing though, lightning has to have a low impedance path to ground, or it will find another. Making lightning do work, by storing it's energy, lessens the chance of it striking.

All taken care of. What a shame I can't tell you about the special circuitry I've added to the basic cap bank that provides it.

I can tell you this much, though. If you were to take all of the charged caps out of the bank and re-wire them in series, you'd have at least a hundred billion volts.

 

[BennyF]

Here's my invention.

It's based on a native American Dreamcatcher, but I'm going to attach three plastic pop bottles made into leyden jars to the tassles, and send it up into the sky on a big kite.

I estimate that each pop bottle will store 18 trillion volts, and power the USA for 10 years.

Sorry if this is what you were thinking of Benny.

It isn't, and I won't be using any capacitor that uses plastic as a dielectric. I gave a reason earlier, so I shouldn't need to repeat myself.

It may interest you to know that I'm going to make another patent search. There may actually be an opportunity for me to patent the first idea I had, a way to collect part of the voltage from lightning. The rest would be grounded in practice, but it's the method that the patent office would be examining.

Both patent applications may be submitted without mentioning lightning, as I said earlier. As far as the patent office is concerned, both ideas will simply be a novel way to charge a capacitor. The two methods would charge the capacitor, as I say they would, regardless of the source of the electricity.

 

[BennyF]

If Benny persists in his "step up voltage to gain energy" ideas his application will go straight to the trash can without being read as an over unity device claim.

Billy, Billy, Billy. How many times do I have to explain this to you?

With a five-branch current divider, one 50v 20pf cap in each branch, and a 12v DC source, you can store 12v in each of the five caps. Then, if you remove them from the (parallel) current divider and re-wire them in series, you'll end up with 60v of potential. Five current branches, according to Ohm's Law, would mean (as I said earlier) that each branch would only see a fifth of the current that entered the divider, but that's not a problem because I've seen an estimates of peak lightning current at 100KA, which is only 1,000 amps after it's been divided into a hundred current branches. If I feel like using a thousand current branches, each one would only carry 100 amps. Remember, the patent office doesn't care about the cost to build the equipment. They only care about the scientific results if you use the hypothetical equipment.

When I initially said that I could store hundreds of millions of volts, I was hypothesizng a similar process. The only differences would've been more current branches, more caps in each branch, and each cap would have a very high voltage rating, possibly 200KV.

Five of those caps, fully charged and re-wired in series, would have a 1MV potential. Fifty of them would have a 10MV potential. Just do the math and eventually you'll reach 100 billion volts of potential. When I later mentioned a hundred billion volts, all I was doing was using my math skills and upgrading the cap bank from a few hundred branches to a few thousand.

I don't have any practical use for a series of caps with 100GV of potential, you understand, but I posted that number simply to give you some idea of the capabilities of a large-scale cap bank. A hundred billion volt potential IS POSSIBLE in a series of caps if each cap in the series came from such a large-scale cap bank.

 

[BennyF]

Benny, you've gone missing for a day.
I hope you aren't trying to patent my invention

You mean your dream-catcher? Don't worry, the dreams I've had lately haven't been worth catching.

Besides, I haven't seen your schematics.

 

[MacGyver1968]

a way to collect part of the voltage from lightning.

You still seem to be missing the difference between voltage and energy. Saying your going to collect voltage from lightning is like saying your going to collect PSI from a garden hose.

 

[Billy T]

... The two methods would charge the capacitor, as I say they would, regardless of the source of the electricity.

Possibly,I can't say without seeing the actual set up (not just a circuit design) but I assure you that only when slowly charging (Period large compared to the LC time constant of the system being charged) will the voltage on the capacitor be essentially the same as on the source at that instant. I.e. If the source supplies voltage for time less than that LC, then the voltage on capacitor will not get up to the source voltage, at least not until the source voltage is falling down from its peak the two voltages may be equal to some voltage less than the peak the source reached earlier.

Likewise if there are no rectifiers and the source voltage is a function of time, like lightning certainly is, which stays connected to the capacitors, then after the peak, as the voltage of the source declines some of stored energy in the capacitor will feed back into the source*, once the capacitor voltage is higher than the then declining source voltage. - Sort of like when a spent battery source is being recharged by a higher voltage source the energy flow is into the battery.

You know all this of course :shrug: and were just speaking carelessly when you said "regardless of the source" - You are not exposing your ignorance again, are you? but just purposely stating more false things to provoke us.

-----------------
* Probably if you can avoid arcs within your system despite the UV of the lightning bolt, then the ionized air around the top of your collector rod may grow into an arc to the ground or lower voltage metal in your system. Basically this residual air ionization is why the second and later strikes of a bolt take the same path and to human eye, which lacks the time resolution to see them separately, sees all of the individual strikes as one.

Here I have been assuming, very likely falsely, that you could get the voltage of your storage system, which is connected to the collector rod, up to approximately the peak voltage of the bolt AND that when it was present at the tip of your collector rod, your system was lower impedance path to ground than just continuing the air arc, which would be basically a straight path of lowest possible inductance to the ground.

I.e the lightning bolt had no problem jumping down to ground more than a kilometer and making the air arc plasma as it did so to cause that path to have low resistance also. - Why would your system, not doubt of higher impedance, "suck" the lighting in from it's preferred path to ground?

Is your patent about some "magic voltage sucker"? -All this talk about circuit diagrams just to mislead us?
PS I don't expect an answer - you never do.

 

[BennyF]

Most people think that to copyright some term(s) names, etc. you need to apply to the USPTO. That may have been true years ago, I do not know, but now is not.

All you need to do is to be sure to always display that little "c" inside the circle WHENEVER you use your term (or as you and I have done) state that the term is copyrighted.

I know someone who used to make a living as a free-lance photographer with a large volume of stock photos that he sold through the mail, usually without ever meeting his clients face-to-face. I asked him once about the subject of copyrights, a subject that was near and dear to his heart. He told me that adding a copyright notice onto the back of a photo does give some protection, but only from the casual public that might be jealous of your artwork. Much better protection is offered by paying the fees to the PTO and having your artwork registered. My friend used a film camera at the time, so what I'm going to tell you may not apply to digital pictures, because the technology is different.

He told me a trick he had learned a long time ago. He said that copyright protection is available for any part of a photograph, so whenever he wanted to protect something, he sent the PTO a proof sheet, showing a same-size print of every negative on the roll. That way, the PTO would consider each same-size print to be a part of the total proof sheet and therefore protect every photo on the roll for one fee and one PTO application.

 

[BennyF]

You still seem to be missing the difference between voltage and energy. Saying your going to collect voltage from lightning is like saying your going to collect PSI from a garden hose.

Humble apologies, kind sir. Voltage and current were the terms we used in my electronics school, and we saw, in the classroom and in the lab, what happened to each one in various circuits.

The patent I'm thinking of applying for will claim that a given capacitor will be charged with part of the energy of a source.

Well, actually, it will claim that any electrical energy whose voltage is higher than a given amount (the voltage rating on the cap, for instance) will be diverted away from the cap.

Yes, the science works.

No, I won't need to mention a cap bank in this application, but the language of the application will allow for one cap to be replaced by a whole bank of them.

Yes, this would be a different patent application than the one we've been discussing so far.

No, I don't need one patent to be granted before I apply for the second.

Finally, no, the source of the electricity doesn't need to be mentioned and probably won't be mentioned in either applicaton. It's just not part of either method of charging the cap(s)

 

[BennyF]

Likewise if there are no rectifiers and the source voltage is a function of time, like lightning certainly is, which stays connected to the capacitors, then after the peak, as the voltage of the source declines some of stored energy in the capacitor will feed back into the source*, once the capacitor voltage is higher than the then declining source voltage. - Sort of like when a spent battery source is being recharged by a higher voltage source the energy flow is into the battery.

This problem is also solved, and no, I can't tell you how without endangering my application, which requires that the idea be unpublished.

Please don't tell me how to protect an application with a SASE or something similar. I've already told you how much I fear infringement by companies that have well-paid lawyers but no principles.

 

[BennyF]

This problem is also solved

I know I'm not giving you guys much to discuss except for the confidence I have in my two patent applications. Perhaps it would be better if I stopped posting here and concentrated my energy on finishing my two applications.

Regards,

Benny

P.S. Thank you once more to whoever told me how to add a drawing of Mr. Franklin to my posts and whoever posted the drawing that I'm now using.

P.P.S. Thank you to all who have improved my inadequate knowledge of physics.

 

[Billy T]

... I fear infringement by companies that have well-paid lawyers but no principles.

That would be most large companies. If GE or Southern Power, etc. wants to use your invention, they will. You don't have the funds to hire lawyers to fight theirs in court for years. Your only hope is license invention to GE and then they can go after Southern Power with their battery of lawyers should Southern Power try to use it without a sub license from GE.

The USPTO does NOT defend your patent in court - you pay for that.

99% of all inventors never have any problem with patent infringement. Their problem is that no one want to use (and certainly not to pay for use) of their invention. If and when Benny gets his patents, That 99% will be 99.00002% of patents with no one interested in using them. Again Benny has the cart before the horse worrying about things that one can foresee will never happen instead of investigating the economics, which easily shows not one will be interested.

 

[BennyF]

Sometimes a well-written letter is enough to discourage illegal behavior, even if it's caused by a corporation's executives with the implicit approval of their board of directors.

There are times when I admire the way foreign governments work, such as the difference between an English lawyer and a Barrister, whose time is mostly spent in his own office instead of an English courtroom.

 

[BennyF]

Mea Culpa again.

Barristers spend their time in English courtrooms. The other legal professionals are called Solicitors, and they are the ones that Englishmen hire to write letters of disapproval.

 

[phlogistician]

All taken care of. What a shame I can't tell you about the special circuitry I've added to the basic cap bank that provides it.

The _only_ way to do it is to conduct the lightning to Earth, and use inductors to tap off the energy. That method is already in use by others however.

I can tell you this much, though. If you were to take all of the charged caps out of the bank and re-wire them in series, you'd have at least a hundred billion volts.

A totally useless feature. Lightning is already at a voltage that is too high to do any reasonable work with. Multiplying it just adds more uselessness. You keep mentioning this, as if this feature somehow makes your contraption unique, and patentable. It won't. First you have to trap and store energy from the lightning, and you can't just get it to zap into capacitors, because as has been demonstrated to you, they block DC. The only way you can get capacitors to conduct, is if you apply a greater voltage across them than the breakdown voltage of the insulator, and well, you should be able to guess what happens then.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

You still seem to be missing the difference between voltage and energy. Saying your going to collect voltage from lightning is like saying your going to collect PSI from a garden hose.

Good analogy.

To increase the pressure you would need to input energy.
For example, if you had a hose filled with water closed at both ends, you could increase the pressure by stepping on it.

Wouldn't that be the same with voltage?

 

[Billy T]

... To increase the pressure you would need to input energy. Wouldn't that be the same with voltage?

You do need to add energy to increase the voltage, but it could be, for example, mechanical energy. If you have charge Q (and -Q) on the two plates of an air gap capacitor that are 1mm that make it have voltage v across the gap, and then you pull them farther apart, say to 1cm spacing you will do work against the electrical attraction between Q & -Q charges.

You will also reduce the capacitance by about a factor of 10, which I will assume for now.

Voltage on a capacitor is directly proportional to the charge on its plates and inversely proportional to the capacitance. So when plate are 10 cm apart the voltage is V =10v. The energy in a capacitor E = 0.5C V^2 or in this example pulling apart drops C by a factor of 10 and increase the V^2 by a factor of 100, so when you have done your work pulling apart there is now 10 times more energy in the capacitor.

Note however you can not get huge voltage and energy step ups this way by pulling the plates huge distance apart because when you have pulled the plates about 20 time the diameter of the plates you have reduced the capacitance to essentially zero and reduction of C below zero is not possible.

A note to phlogistician:

True that DC will not flow thru a capacitor, but implied is that the voltage of this DC is constant. If it should change, then the wires of the capacitor will have a current (out of the capacitor if the voltage is dropping and into the capacitor is it is rising, which would be Benny's case.)

However, another of the many things Benny is ignorant of is that the electric field's voltage contours, which are constant voltage surfaces essentially parallel to the zero voltage surface of the Earth prior to his capacitor having any charge will change as it charges. I will try to "type draw" a "before" and "after" diagram:

Before:
------------------------------V where V> v. (The -------- represents constant voltage surface contours, one at V, the other at v.)

------------------------------v
..............C......................... dots represent the Earth and C a capacitor sitting on it.

After:
-----------^---------------------V (The inverted V should be connected to the ------ s if drawing were better. I.e. the constant voltage contours are always continuous.)
-----------^---------------------v
..............C.........................

The lightning is "looking" for an easy way to the zero potential ground, so it will avoid the region where higher above ground there is the bump up in the V voltage surface. I.e. even if Benny did manage to get some charge into his capacitor, that increase in its voltage would raise the voltage contours above his partially charged capacitor and cause the lightning bolt to by-pass his capacitor with an arc to ground at best, near his capacitor; however, I seriously doubt Benny will have this problem as the inductance of his lead in and divider wires plus that within the capacitor its self will make lightning by-pass his circuits from the very start so his capacitor will not develop much voltage and will not bend the voltage contours upward much.

BTW, lightning rods can be considered to work the same way, but with a copper rod sticking up it is the Zero voltage contour which is elevated up. This will attract lighting to it (instead of the house) as the lightning is "looking" for the easiest way to the zero potential surface (contour). With Benny's partially charged capacitor elevating the positive contours above it, it is REPELLING the lighting bolt - effectively telling the lightning:
"Look how high the voltage potential is here above the capacitor! - If you continue down towards it, you will have a long way to go, thru many more positive voltage contours. Be smart: by-past this high voltage hill and take the quick way to ground to the side of this higher voltage hill."

Lighting rods also, and more frequently, avoid any lightning strike near them or the house as their top is sharply pointed to encourage a weak steady discharge, which "bleeds off" the charge that if it continued to grow could become a bolt.

At time when it is very dark and there is great danger of a lighting strike this current makes enough ionization of the air to be visible. -It is called St Elmos' fire. - I have seen it from the top of an aluminum sailboat mast. - I was so scared that I even was praying as I knew what it was and that lightning might strike the mast, which was the highest thing for miles as I was in the ocean, far from land. At times that St Elmos' Fire was so strong I could hear it hissing!