Capacitor to store lightning?

[phlogistician]

I think, in fact, I know that if you look at the graphic, you'll see that at its' peak, it delivered over 100 lightning strikes per minute. This is one of the thousands of facts I have discovered over the past five years' worth of research.

Have you heard the saying 'lightning never strikes the same place twice'?

So, if there is a favourable path to ground that gets struck by a lightning bolt, why don't ALL the subsequent bolts strike the same place? I mean, using your reasoning, the tallest building in a city with a lightning rod would _always_ get struck, but that doesn't happen. Why?

 

[BennyF]

Ahem. It would seem that some people are unaware of the fact that electrical storms can produce more than one lightning bolt. If you look earlier in this thread, I think, yes, I think you'll find a graphical scan of an electrical storm in progress, just past its' peak, in fact.

I think, in fact, I know that if you look at the graphic, you'll see that at its' peak, it delivered over 100 lightning strikes per minute. This is one of the thousands of facts I have discovered over the past five years' worth of research.

Once someone has decided that he wants to capture and store some (or even all) of the electrical energy in an electrical storm, that person should make a second decision, whether to attempt to leave his capacitor-based equipment open to being charged two, three, or four times in an hour, or whether he'd rather detach his equipment after the first lightning strike.

Considering the fact that the 2010 electrical storm delivered over 100 lightning strikes per minute, maybe I should have said that people who want to set up an electricity collection-and-storage system should prepare for the possibility that their caps could be charged twenty, thirty, or even forty times during a single hour.

Benny

 

[phlogistician]

Considering the fact that the 2010 electrical storm delivered over 100 lightning strikes per minute, maybe I should have said that people who want to set up an electricity collection-and-storage system should prepare for the possibility that their caps could be charged twenty, thirty, or even forty times during a single hour.

Benny

Have you heard the saying 'lightning never strikes the same place twice'?

So, if there is a favourable path to ground that gets struck by a lightning bolt, why don't ALL the subsequent bolts strike the same place? I mean, using your reasoning, the tallest building in a city with a lightning rod would _always_ get struck, but that doesn't happen. Why?

 

[BennyF]

I mean, using your reasoning, the tallest building in a city with a lightning rod would _always_ get struck, but that doesn't happen.

The tallest building in Canada was, until recently, the tallest building in the world. It's called the CN Tower, named after the Canadian National Railroad, and it gets hit by lightning about 75 times every year.

http://gocanada.about.com/od/canadiancities1/qt/15factscntower.htm

Read "Fact #8" about the tower, do the math, and this averages out to more than once a week.

 

[BennyF]

So, if there is a favourable path to ground that gets struck by a lightning bolt, why don't ALL the subsequent bolts strike the same place?

If you look at the graphic I posted last year, showing the Iowa thunderstorm in progress, you'll notice that some of the lightning bolts went from one cloud to another cloud in the same area. The NWS says that only about 10% of the lightning bolts ever strike anything on the ground.

It's those 10% that I'll be "aiming for" when I set up my collection and processing equipment, and I already know that some of those bolts will be positively charged.

One more time, just in case you missed it, my patent application won't mention lightning at all. It's just a method of charging a capacitor, a method that hasn't been patented yet unless it falls under the unlikely possibility that the U.S. Government has decided to give a previously-issued patent some form of a security classification. The word "unlikely" is my own choice, based on the limited information I have about the purposes of having a classification system, it's usage now, and what I know about the details of my own unfinished patent application.

 

[MacGyver1968]

In your 5 years of research, have you ever calculated the total amount of electricity that is contained in a strike? And if yes..what number did you come up with?

????

 

[BennyF]

Hi, MacGyver. I'm going to defer to a guy named Jim Swenson from the Argonne National Laboratory who responded to someone named Paige when she asked about the mass of a lightning bolt. The link is at the end of this message, and remember, his response is based on an "average" negatively-charged lightning bolt, only 30 KAmps of current and 100 MVolts. I've seen estimates of 100 KA and 500 MV for some of the larger "above-average" bolts, and NASA once measured a bolt at one of their launching pads that was 200 KA.

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/lightning says the average lightning bolt measures 30,000 Amps, 5 Coulombs, 10^8 volts, and roughly 0.003 seconds. I'll guess the altitude it comes from is 10,000 feet.

The energy released would be the charge times the voltage: 5 Coul. x 10^8 Volts = 5e8 Joules. Before the lightning discharge, this energy is more or less evenly distributed over a large volume (1 cubic mile or so), being the square of the electric field from cloud to ground. This energy all suddenly converges horizontally to the middle and, I do not think it "shoots to ground", I think it just slams into the center axis, dissipating itself in the hot plasma of the lightning column. One could calculate a pressure pulse due to that mass flow suddenly converging in the middle.

The mass corresponding to this energy is (reversing E=mc2): m=E/c2, which always works provided it's all expressed in genuine, official MKS units. m= 5e8 Joules / (3e8 meter/sec)^2 = 5.5e-9 kg, roughly 1/2 micro-gram. Disappointingly small, I feel...

How hard would this moving mass punch the ground if it was travelling downwards?

I would assume it's travelling not at the speed of light, but at speed = distance / duration = 10,000 feet x 0.003 seconds = 3km * 3msec = 10 meter/second.

Momentum = 1/2 microgram * 10 meter/second; could not quite squash a mosquito if it was all in one spot. And it might be spread out over many square meters. Maybe a sensitive seismometer could pick it up.​

But later in the same response, Jim says this:

t is not clear that all this mass/energy travels down right inside the visible lightning bolt. There is another point of view that says the energy flow is proportional to the electric field times the magnetic field, (assuming they are perpendicular) at each point in space. After all, we know that Voltage x Current = Power. Electric field always adds up to a voltage, and Magnetic field indicates a current.

It is called the Poynting vector. It is a person's name, not a redundancy pun. It is direction is perpendicular to both electric and magnetic lines. In this point of view, the energy flow is something free space always happens to do, in the vicinity of wherever you build a wire with a current in it. Kind of spooky. But the energy is not in the wire, just our handle on the energy. Has a lot to do with loop- and area- integrals of fields, complex calculus you may do in college.

Almost all the current of the lightning discharge is in the visible column, but it is surrounded by circling lines of magnetic field, which diminish in proportion to distance from the column. All this is immersed in a uniform vertical electric field from cloud to ground, which decreases continuously with time during the current flow.

So all this energy flow has the mass and momentum and K.E. you think it has, But it is borderless and much broader than the lightning column. And it surges not from top to bottom, but from outside to the center.

The reference above mentioned the rarer and stronger "Positive lightning", which may have roughly 100 times the energy of the usual negative lightning strike.​

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy00/phy00876.htm

 

[MacGyver1968]

Ok...so 500 million joules for the average strike...right? Assuming all of that is in the form of electricity, and all of it is captured without loss...you are still looking at an average of around 138 kilowatt/hr of electricity stored in your caps in each strike. Assuming 75 strikes a year, like the 1800 ft tall CN tower...that would be 10350 kilowatt/hr per year collected...or 862 kilowatt/hr per month...or 28 kilowatt/hr per day on average. So with an ideal system, you would be storing about 4 dollars worth of electricity a day on average.

 

[BennyF]

MacGyver, I look for electrical storms pretty often. They happen mostly in the summer, but I have seen and recorded graphical scans of storms in progress in just about every month of the year that happen somewhere in the continental U.S. I've been seeing and recording storms for over three years, and I have a good idea where to find them. I have a list of dozens of internet addresses for lightning detection equipment located in various U.S. cities and towns.

When I go to any of these addresses, I see a picture, similar to the picture I posted last year of the Iowa storm. At first glance, it looks like a radar scan, but the equipment isn't looking for airplanes, it's looking for lightning bolts. Every dot on the screen at that moment is a lightning bolt that has been detected somewhere close to that lightning detector in that particular city or town.

Some of the electrical storms are small, only recording half a dozen strikes before the clouds dissipate. Others, like the 2010 Iowa storm, record over 100 strikes per minute at their peak and sometimes over 1,000 strikes in total for that one electrical storm.

The NWS says that 9 out of every 10 strikes go from one cloud to another cloud, and the graphical scans I see and record as graphical images show all the strikes being classified into one of five categories:

1. Positive cloud to cloud
2. Negative cloud to cloud (note: I honestly don't understand the distinction between them.)
3. Positive cloud to ground
4. Negative cloud to ground
5. Undetermined (in all likelihood, the lightning bolt hit too far away to be studied)

Your analysis of the economics may be accurate, but I must ask a question that can make a big difference to anyone who's interested in the economics of capturing and using the electricity from lightning. If one electrical storm can send over 100 strikes per minute to one city, then why can't the same storm send multiple strikes in an hour to one properly designed lightning rod, connected to a very hungry cap bank?

 

[BennyF]

This is a separate quesiton, perhaps best answered by a meteorologist.

If at any given moment two clouds have such a big difference in their voltage levels that electricity travels through the air from one cloud to the other, which is, according to the NWS a much more frequent event than lightning going from a cloud to anything on the ground, how can you classify this event as either a negative cloud-to-cloud lightning strike or a positive lightning strike?

In other words, what's the difference between a positive and a negative cloud-to-cloud lightning strike?

Benny

 

[MacGyver1968]

Your analysis of the economics may be accurate,

Would you spend a million dollars or more to build a gold mine that only yields .0022 ounces of gold a day? What would be the point? :shrug:

 

[wlminex]

BennyF . . . ."build it, and they will come!" . . . from Field of Dreams.

wlminex

 

[BennyF]

Would you spend a million dollars or more to build a gold mine that only yields .0022 ounces of gold a day? What would be the point? :shrug:

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. Even areas that have oil or natural gas deep underground have a limited supply of either commodity. Once you're close to finding all of it in any one area, the economics of looking for that last ten percent prevent all but the most dedicated (or foolhardy) from searching any more. In my humble opinion, the process of finding and extracting oil and natural gas is best understood and appreciated if this country can only take what the area can produce in a ten- or twenty-year period.

On the other hand, the economics of extracting electricity from lightning are very different. For this purpose, let's say that someone has gotten all the permits and all the financing to buy land and set up a straightforward cap bank, with the appropriate electrical equipment for discharging -part of it, as AC, into his office, and part of it, as DC, into water electrolysis.

Now that the equipment is set up in an appropriate location, a storm comes up. The company's meteorologist sees it and tells the company's technicians to prepare for a charging event. They go to their work stations and wait. Lightning from the storm hits the company's lightning rod. The technicians see the current flowing because some of the wires have an ammeter built into them. The storm stops and the discharging process begins.

Now the capacitors are discharged. ALL of them. The company is ready for another electrical storm to begin, using the same cap bank, the same wires, the same discharging equipment, a refilled tank of purified water to be electrolyzed, and possibly even a reused lightning rod. The capital expenses only happen once, but the incoming electricity can come again and again, possibly years after the equipment has been set up.

This setup and charging-discharging pair of processes is very different than what any mine owner/operator deals with. Electrical storms happen every year. At any given moment in ANY year, there's a storm happening somewhere in the world.

 

[wlminex]

a gold mine that produces 0.0022 oz/d yields $4.07/d ( at $1850/oz gold). . . that along with presumed governmental $ incentives, loans, and subsidies could be a viable endeavor . . . compare to ethanol fuel projects . . . or the recent solar 'green' energy company that finally went bankrupt . . .

wlminex

 

[MacGyver1968]

Whether it's a gold mine or any other business...no one in their right mind would spend a million dollars just to get a $4 a day return.

 

[wlminex]

MacGyver #555:

H-m-m-m-m . . . it seems that our government has been doing this for years!

 

[BennyF]

Whether it's a gold mine or any other business...no one in their right mind would spend a million dollars just to get a $4 a day return.

Please remember, whenever I've been talking about this electricity extraction concept, I've referred to a very large-scale bank of capacitors, with 1,000 current branches to handle the approx. 100 KAmps in the largest lightning bolts and thousands of 200 MVolt capacitors wired in series in each branch to handle the approx. 500 MVolts of an above-average negatively-charged lightning bolt. Positively-charged lightning bolts are much rarer, but the scans I see and record have plenty of them, and the NWS says that the positive bolts can have double the voltage of a negative bolt That means that one positively-charged bolt could measure up to a billion volts.

I don't believe that anyone could get a patent for a cap bank, even a very large-scale one, in 2011, so I don't mind mentioning it here on the SciForums board. My own circuitry, the circuitry that I will send to the U.S. Patent Office, the circuitry that I have never told anyone about, is different. It may be more economical than the cap bank that I've been talking about, but I'm not going to risk my potential patent just to find out whether it's economical or not. Sorry, but that's the way it has to be.

Benny

 

[wlminex]

BennyF #557:

GO FOR IT!

 

[BennyF]

BennyF #557:

GO FOR IT!

Thanks.

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[phlogistician]

The tallest building in Canada was, until recently, the tallest building in the world. It's called the CN Tower, named after the Canadian National Railroad, and it gets hit by lightning about 75 times every year.

http://gocanada.about.com/od/canadiancities1/qt/15factscntower.htm

Read "Fact #8" about the tower, do the math, and this averages out to more than once a week.

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.