Kind of reminds me of an improvised 2 mega watt version I once saw being used to load test large generators on a ship. 3 phase 480 volts. They simply lowered the bare copper wires into the sea water. They controlled resistance thru the sea water by how far they lowered them into the water. I...
Include "gas turbine blades" in your search. You may even have to make some phone calls to the strain gauge distributors to find the ones designed to put onto blades in a spinning gas turbine. You are looking for the ones for the compressor section where they don't have to be designed for high...
We have had some very expensive failures in spacecraft caused by arcing and sparking in a vacuum or near vacuum. That is why NASA tests all equipment in a vacuum chamber before sending it up into space.
Every once in a while some bean counter will save money by not doing these tests, and we...
In many high current applications, we go to solid copper bus bars, which is about the same thing as a solid rod. This is the best way to handle very high current with minimum voltage drop. We can drop the idea that many small wires do the job better than one solid wire.
I've seen bus bars...
If all that be true, then why are wires that are installed in applications that don't require fatigue resistance to repeated flexing generally solid strand? The building code in most jurisdictions requires solid strand and forbids multi-strand.
This is just like wire rope. Mobile cranes...
Or you could induce a lightning strike the same way everyone else does it. Fire a small rocket into a thunderhead, trailing a very thin wire. I think the bigger problem would be figuring out how to do something useful with a huge amount of power delivered over a very short time duration.
I don't know much about electrical engines. I work with mechanical, but I assume many of the same principles apply. I've seen logical arguments that it would be a factor of eight. But in practice it is less than that. Sometimes not much less.