It doesn't matter how you intend to store the energy, billvon provided you with how much energy you have to play with, and storing it different ways doesn't alter that figure. IE, you have a small amount of energy of you could capture all of the electrical component, but you can't even do that.
Capacitor to store lightning?
- Thread starter cato
- Start date
- Status
It doesn't matter how you intend to store the energy, billvon provided you with how much energy you have to play with, and storing it different ways doesn't alter that figure. IE, you have a small amount of energy of you could capture all of the electrical component, but you can't even do that.
Right. And due to the laws of thermodynamics, you will get less energy out of the process than you put in since it is not 100% efficient. In other words, at the end of the process, you'd have enough hydrogen to run a house for 45 minutes, rather than enough electricity to run a house for over an hour.
Yep. And there is a reason that, in general, it is not used for making hydrogen; it's just not that efficient.
Again, there's just not that much energy available. Lots and lots of power, but not much energy. It's a neat idea and might be a good option to power (say) a pole mounted weather station, something that requires little power but is exposed to lightning often. And apparently it's great for powering time machines.
But for energy production, you'd get far more out of a square mile of solar panels than a square mile of lightning collectors.*
---------------
* actual numbers:
Max annual lightning strikes per square mile: 400 (Kenya)
Energy per square mile per year: 600 kilowatt-hours a year
Power available from solar panels - approx 10 watts/sq ft
1 square mile of collector - 278 megawatts in the sun
6 hours of average direct sun a day in Phoenix, 365 days a year - 610,536,960 kilowatt-hours a year
Last edited:
I don't think Benny understands the difference. Everytime we talk about total energy, he starts talking about millions of volts and 10's of thousands of amps...but seems to completely ignore the time aspect of the equation.
If you have a huge, high-pressure water pipe that can deliver 1000 gallons per second, but you only open the valve for 3/1000ths of a second...you're only going to get 3 gallons of water total. I don't think he understands this.
35 USC S. 102(b)
Thanks. I was too lazy and disinterested to search.
“A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)...
(b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country,
more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or …”
(c) ...
From: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_102.htm
I knew this was true ~25 years go, but it still is. Just one more example of the fact BennyF rarely knows anything about what he is posting about.
In fact, is there anything BennyF has been correct about?
Later by edit: Yes, Benny is correct on one thing: Ben Franklin was a great statesman and inventor (The free-standing, cast-iron, "Franklin stove" is about 5 times more efficient than a fire place, and he also invented bi-focals, and many other things.) and was quite a "lady's man" while a diplomat in Paris. He made significant advances in ALL forms of French/American relationships.
Last edited by a moderator:
You asked me to prove something I never said.
You're factually incorrect. Capacitors don't block DC electricity, they store it.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about. Before lightning can strike anywhere, it must overcome the breakdown voltage of the air between the point of the highest negative charge and a point of positive charge. This second point, according to the NWS, is likely to be another cloud, nine times out of every ten, but that tenth event could be a golfer who was holding a metal-shafted club at the last moment of his life, a 12-year-old boy playing Little League Baseball holding an aluminum baseball bat, or even people standing under a tree, but before it does that, lightning must create an ionized channel which is the path of least resistance.
After a cloud has built up enough charge to overcome the resistance of miles of air between the cloud and the ground, it can then strike people, buildings, and trees, sometimes starting wildfires because of the immense heat associated with a bolt of lightning. If the lightning collector in my system is conductive enough, and located close enough to an ongoing electrical storm, it can be hit by hundreds of millions of volts and tens of thousands of amps of DC electricity. After that, the path of least resistance could be the energy-storing apparatus connected to the lightning rod, the details of which will never be discussed here until sometime after I receive a patent on it. I'm sure you understand why I say this.
In other words, don't remind you that you lost the argument? Sorry, but you're much too eager to win one, so it's only fair that I should remind you sometimes that broken wires are not capacitors and that while capacitors will be in my circuit designs, broken wires won't.
I'm not trying to. Again, you misunderstand me. My circuitry will simply allow someone with a minimum amount of electrical knowledge to charge a capacitor in a way that's never been done before.
Benny, an admirer of Mr. Franklin
They do both, actually, which is easy to demonstrate in a lab.
Why not? As I am sure you are aware, you are covered as soon as you file. Indeed, if you post something about it, and someone copies you, the end result would be you making more money in the long run.
I won't discuss the details of the circuitry I'll send to the U.S. Patent Office, and I won't discuss the details of the circuitry I'll set up to collect real electrical energy.
Water electrolysis can produce hydrogen and oxygen, but right now, the price you have to pay for AC, combined with the price you have to pay to convert it to DC, are too high compared with the price that you can currently receive when you sell hydrogen and oxygen.If this is what you meant when you said "inefficient", then I agree with you.
Please limit your discussion to science and not science fiction. I documented an electrical storm in Iowa last year that had, at its' peak, over 100 lightning strikes per minute and over 1,000 lightning strikes in total, just for that one storm on that one day. With a normal distribution, most of those would go from one cloud to another, but there would still be many that could possibly strike an appropriately designed and constructed air terminal [see US Patent Class 174, Subclass 2] and could possibly have their combined electrical energies stored in a bank of capacitors.
Solar panels cannot prevent wildfires, they cannot prevent deaths from direct lightning strikes, and they cannot prevent damage to personal property, commercial property, or government property.
http://www.weather.gov/om/lightning/fatalities.htm
I said it before, and I'll say it again. Deaths and destruction from lightning strikes can sometimes be prevented simply by erecting grounded lightning rods in areas of the country that see a lot of it, especially northern Florida, but if you have bothered to set up a rod, why not collect the energy at that point instead of simply grounding it?
While I haven't had any physics training outside of a single high school class, I do understand the distinction you made. It is my hope that the capacitor(s) I set up will be charged many times during a storm, using the capacitance that is an important part of their design, and thank you for not being as insulting as Phil when you explained this concept.
Thank you, Nasor, for providing the chapter and section numbers.
The legal citation seems to be accurate and relevant, but I don't know when my application will be ready to send in. It could take me another year before that happens.
Please understand, this is the very first time I have ever even thought about applying for a Patent. I have been working alone, without any prior experience, without any mentors to guide me, without a patent attorney to help me with the application, and without any corporate support I could count on, knowing that the corporation would expect an assignment of some or all of my legal rights afterward.
I want to be as certain as I possibly can be that when I send in my application that it is the very best application that I can produce. I would say that it's 90% complete. I have written every word myself. I have composed circuit drawings myself under the standards that they require for circuit drawings. I have done a patent search myself and satisfied myself that my circuitry isn't covered by any other patent, with the possible and unlikely exception of patents that are only visible to people who hold security clearances. I have even been to the patent "sandbox", an area on their website where inventors can go through the motions of sending in an application just for the practice value.
All that remains is for me to write that last 10%, check every drawing, re-read every page of printed text, send in the application along with the $500 total cost of the three separate application fees, and wait a year or two to find out whether the application was good enough.
I'll let you all know when it's been sent in.
Benny
Excuse me, but I didn't tell anyone that patent details couldn't be protected prior to the application, I ASKED for the chapter and section numbers of the patent laws. Nasor provided them without insulting me, and I thanked him for it. You don't get the same amount of respect from me because you didn't respect ME as much as Nasor did, and I don't care whether you're a moderator or not. You still shouldn't be putting people down, just because they don't have as much technical knowledge as you do.
Benny
Last edited:
Hope doesn't make it happen. Practical experience should tell you this. It's pretty rare for the same object (with the exception of extremely tall structures) to be hit by lightning more than once in a storm...but that's the least of your problems.
The details don't matter. You can't get more energy out than you put in to the system. If you claim that you are doing that, the patent office will reject your application automatically, as they do any physically impossible patent. (perpetual motion, zero point energy, antigravity etc)
In what area? I strongly suspect it was over more than a square mile.
You are planning on attracting intercloud lightning in a manner that is more effective than, say, a 2000 foot tall grounded metal antenna? (Such antennas typically see ~200 strikes per year here in the US.) How will you do this?
Solar panels cannot prevent wildfires, they cannot prevent deaths from direct lightning strikes, and they cannot prevent damage to personal property, commercial property, or government property.[/quote]
And lightning rods cannot power whole towns.
You can. And if your goal is to run a few light bulbs it could work. But you just won't get much energy.
Last edited:
Good to see you are finally recognizing the fact that the lighting energy may not flow into your physically large condenser bank array (due to the large impedance of even just the network of conduction wires will represent for short lightning pulses). It is possible, but very unlikely, that the lightning bolt may miss your metal tower and hit one of the capacitors directly - exploding it - that is the most likely way any of the bolts energy will get into a condenser due to the higher impedance of your wire distribution to condensers network - higher than just an air arc to ground from the bottom of the metal tower to nearby ground.
Last edited by a moderator:
I would have more respect for your posts if any main point of them about the physics of circuits were correct - tell me one.
Forget the capacitors, stick with kites.
Last edited:
What you actually said was:
Which is not quite correct. Capacitors block DC in a circuit. Current does not flow through a capacitor, but will, for a short time, depending on the rating of the capacitor, flow into it, but not through it.
CAPACITORS BLOCK DC. I refer you to the previous Wikipedia link.
They block DC and store charge.
Benny, you are trying to make lightning do work, by entering and being stored by your apparatus. That makes it rather unfavourable, especially as capacitors block DC.
What argument? I never had that argument. You brought this up in post Post #303 not me. I then later discussed the construction of capacitors and told you were were NOT discussing 'broken wires' in post #310 . I have repeatedly told you your analogy and references to 'broken wires' were inaccurate and pointless. In post #311 you say:
So I never was. There was no argument about this from me other than it was not relevant to the discussion.
Benny, to charge a capacitor, one applies a voltage across it. DONE. Do you not think if there were a gaping hole in this knowledge, someone with more than 'minimum knowledge' would have seen it already?
I'm pretty sure that with yesterday's passage of H.R. 1249, the filing fee for "micro entities" is going to be substantially reduced. I don't remember what the new amount is going to be, but I want to say $75. It's supposed to be a lot less, anyway.
Heh...good luck. I'm still examining stuff from 2007/2008. And with some of the stupidness in H.R. 1249, the backlog is probably going to get worse before it gets better.
Also, you might want to get acquainted with class 320 subclass 167.
Good luck.
- Status