Can We Harness Lightning to Generate Energy?

[zhana]

I would think you can measure it via sensors on a lightning rod.

Hmm,I doubt that.Now I'm thinking and I recon you can measure current , total charge transfer,or even to extrapolate the energy dissipated locally -in the place that particular lightning strikes.
But total energy that lightning discharge release I think you cannot.

 

[Mnemonyss]

I've been contemplating this for a while - and I think trying to use modern technology for something so natural isn't the answer - of course we like to think in terms of wires and circuits. But that comes later - the harnessing of this power should be basic at first - raw almost.

I've been working on this... figuring things out - Think about it like this

In the old days we used crystal set radios - they used galena or cadmium sulfide, a semi conductive material inside a copper cup - much like a battery eh?

So yeah - these things weren't powered electrically.

They pulled in the energy of sound waves - radio signals! They actually worked!
Sooo...

what I'm thinking is ditch the circuitry to refine the power until after it's stored.
Look to perhaps allowing something to attract the energy first (Lightning rod)
Then it travels the rod to something else - much like this galena mineral...
perhaps rose quartz? I'm still thinking - will prolly build a model and test some of these ideas out to see what happens.

I'm thinking - if I build a large enough grid - with some of these crystal cells to house the power - and a switch that would allow me to switch from conventional power to stored power - this could be something revolutionary.

at least for times of crisis - or even just to lower your electrical bill every year :p

Come on, all the psychics have been using this crystal energy for decades - why not really use them for energy?

Is it because we don't have the technology to tap into the crystals?

That's simple - it's called light, concentrated laser light maybe.

Sure - use some minimal conventional/generator powered laser light :)

So you have some high tech phototronic device that pulls the energy from the crystal much like a laser - and changes it into a charge that could actually be stored in a power cell of some type.

Of course this will need more brainstorming and I'm not an authority - but I have seen this in my head too many times to keep me from thinking it's not possible.

 

[Antiphon]

A capacitor is more natural for catching the charge than an inductor.

Pretend you had a 10 KiloFarad capacitor that could survive being hit. If it
got hit by a 10 KiloAmp bolt that lasted one second, it would be charged
to one volt on it's terminals, since Q = CV.

The energy in such a capacitor would only be 1/2 C V*V = 5K Joules.

This shows that the enormous power in a bolt is the product of that
large current and the high voltage that it falls through which is millions
of volts.

"OK", you say. "I'll charge a 1 Farad capacitor instead. That will leave
me with a lot of Volts." In this case, the cap will get up to 10 KV.
Now the energy is 1/2 * 1 * 10K*10K = 50 MegaJoules. This is more like
it.


The rest is a matter of simple engineering to make a capacitor that will
not be destroyed when charged for one second with 50 Megawatts of
power. Simple.

 

[CharlesP]

I didn't see any numbers so I thought maybe throw out these if my memory is correct. You get no more than a million amperes for a microsecond average and the voltage must be small enough so the lightning doesn't bypass your terminals, say ten million volts. Try engineering that. Remember that enormous voltages are available to blow your parts.

 

[ackermann]

well, maybe one could take a huge electricaly isolated tank of salty water (not very expencive), place a kind of lid that is able to move without much problem (like a piston), place the tank high, place a conducting material (cooper rod) in contact with the water which will be the “intake” from the lightning and another condicting material in contact to the water and ground.
when the lightning came it will break the water molecule by hydrolisys, which will produce a huge volume of gas (H2 and O2, apart), this gas will move the piston which will store it all (theoricaly). this gases can be then used to whatever and the product of combustion is oviouslly water, so it is clean.

sorry for my grammar, english is not my first language…

 

[ackermann]

I don't believe that would happen (ackermann, i think the very spark you're using to electrolyze the water may in turn ignite the hydrogen and oxygen gas mixture causing a catastrophic boom. or, if contained, it would at least be a lot of heat remaining.) because the gasses does not necessary mix, one would be at the anode and the other at the catode. if anode and catode are placed properly there will not be a combustion; also if the salinity is controlled a spark inside the tank can be avoided...

 

[Michael Warne]

Hello Leonardo - I only joined this website hoping I could pass a few ideas that may work. I'm not a scientist so I may be completely wrong. So, regarding capture of lightning (1) It seems hopeless to try to capture lightning directly - I thought making a lightning rod with the minimum number of coils to create induction which would be picked up by a second parallel coil. This coil could initially be a long way away and progressively brought closer until a workable induced voltage became apparent. (2) I thought that the lightning rod should be allowed to melt! Here I may be in trouble but I thought of a high temperature ceramic casing for a copper coil so that the copper could retain it's shape and melt too, then recover after the lightning had passed. (3) Hit the ball out of the park! Just one "wack!". I really believe that we are not looking hard enough at clockwork. HUMUNGOUS Clockwork. What about 100 foot gears maybe. So, a door bell style of simple coil which is thrown to wind a very large mechanism, like the fair-ground style hammer-hit. It starts to sound a bit like your solenoids. Throw a big, heavy cylinder straight up a pole so that it will come down slowly and rotate, driving a dynamo.
OK - that's about it really. Maybe there's something in there. Kind regards, Michael Warner, Australia.
(Sorry guys - I didn't even put this post in the right place!.

 

[bigpooz]

Lightening forms nitrates, not nitrides.

two very large solenoids (tons maybe ) Stacked vertically, very large capacity wire coil w/ iron core. upper solenoid attached to guide rails to keep its trajectory vertical.
now introduce current I.E. lightning strike. how can one tell if the upper solenoid will be lifted or how far it would be separated from the lower?

Nitrides are the main benefit, or at least generated as a by product if lightning, and by the way, most these lighting has provided the nutrition that allow food to be grown and produced. As far as hydrogen is concerned, it is good for blimps. not much else really.

 

[bigpooz]

Refer to the following link for essential information on lightening.

http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/

Lightning is produced by thunderstorms, but it can also accompany volcanic eruptions, intense forest fires, above-ground nuclear detonations, heavy snowstorms, and hurricanes. It is the release of potential energy to the ground (or sea).

Remember the equation E = IR for electrical circuits. 'E' is voltage (potential energy), 'I' is current (flow), and 'R' is resistance. Currents (kinetic energy) can be converted into useful work. Without resistance, there is no electrical current. This is why lightning rods work. They conduct up to 100 million electon volts to the ground without melting. This is remarkable in view of the fact that the temperature of lighting bolts can reach 50,000°F.

Voltage per se is not harmful. (You've probably demonstrations, where a kid stands on a platform which is charged with a few thousand volts. His/her hair stands out, but but s\he survives the experience unscathed.)

You can draw analogies between electricy and a dammed river. The dam provides resistance. The height of the dam is analogous to voltage. The flow of water, like electrical current, does all the work. Importantly, it follows the path of least resistance. Without resistance (the dam), the amount of potential energy in the system is low.

When lightning hits a relatively tall non-conducting object -- a tree, an un-rodded building, a human being -- the resistance in those objects creates current. It's the current (E/R) that does the damage.

To capture lightning energy, one must find a way to create resistance with a device that can withstand 50,000°F, but not enough resistance to direct the stike elsewhere.

And as previous posters have stated: Lightening is fast! Capacitors, impedence loops, etc., don't respond quickly enough to capture it. Instead, they just get fried.

 

[mickmccrory]

Your biggest problem is likely the inductance of the wire itself as a straight piece of wire, much less the wire wound in a coil.

Any impedance means the current will be converted into heat. Current squared times impedance tells you the heat generated, and this would be a lot. Might need like MCM500 wire or something...

Its always nice to prove something can be done when everyone says it can't. I was pretty sure I could trisect an angle at one point! :) I think we'd all like for you to prove us wrong and provide a meaningful alternative energy source (any of us that have been to the gas pump lately anyways) but you do have convential wisdom working against you.

Cliff

Cliff, In 10th grade, my geometry teacher said "You can't trisect an angle." I know how to do it.! I have it drawn up in my cad system. This technique can be used to not only trisect , but to "N"-sect it. Any # of divisions. I will send it to you if interested. Mc

 

[mickmccrory]

Your biggest problem is likely the inductance of the wire itself as a straight piece of wire, much less the wire wound in a coil.

Any impedance means the current will be converted into heat. Current squared times impedance tells you the heat generated, and this would be a lot. Might need like MCM500 wire or something...

Its always nice to prove something can be done when everyone says it can't. I was pretty sure I could trisect an angle at one point! :) I think we'd all like for you to prove us wrong and provide a meaningful alternative energy source (any of us that have been to the gas pump lately anyways) but you do have convential wisdom working against you.

Cliff

Geometry proof (construction) n-sect an angle

 

[mickmccrory]

Geometry proof (construction) n-sect an angle

Drawing of geometry proof

 

[sophiecentaur]

It's only the Resistive component of Impedance that will 'convert the current into heat'.

 

[JWTyus]

Why not just try to capture the enormous heat? Could you run a turbine from steam generation?
Use stored thermal energy as the "hot" end of a Sterling Engine? I know it sounds kind of brute force and wasteful, but it seems simple enough...

 

[whocouldshebe]

Why not just get about 1000 3 liters bottles filled with 50/50 salt-vinegar/water solution coated with aluminum foil then connect their internal solutions all together using triple shielded coaxial cable wires to a central point all connected to an ungrounded lighting rod with large ball at the top, like maybe a flag pole, in the middle of a field, then connect all the bottles external ground aluminum foil wraps through a single light gauge wire switch.

Flip the switch on when the storm comes within 10 kilometers to ground out the pole through the electrolytic solution so it definitely gets struck. The light gauge wire switch will fry and the volts will be forced into the leyden jars, the water will dissipate the heat and load forced evenly divided among each jar if the grid wires are distributed so that each wire has the same length going into a single jar and converge all at the same point weaved into a grid and connected evenly at the bottom of the pole.

I'll try it one day if I ever collect enough wire, you'd need at least 10,000 feet of high quality coaxial cable, but if it gets struck 4 times a year without burning up you could power your house from the charge for the whole year. LOL

 

[Fish4Fun]

whocouldshebe,

Welcome to PF!

As this thread has been periodically revived since 2004 (!) I think there may be a somewhat more practical way to "capture" high-voltage, low current energy from storms, LOL. The experiment begins in 1867 with a man named "Lord Kelvin", ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper ). It might be a bit tricky to pull off on a large scale, but it has to be easier than attempting to capture lightening, LOL.

I have seen examples of "stacking collectors" to increase the output ( http://amasci.com/emotor/kelvin.html ), but I suspect it would take a very large number of "collectors" combined with a lot of water to get much energy, but the fact that the energy is high-voltage might help some-what.

Ultimately devising schemes to capture and store high-voltage//high-energy sources is problematic and lossy, and no plan to date that I have seen has resolved that, but it is fun to think about!

Fish

 

[Mike Lauzon]

Understandably, the utilisation of electricity as electricity is not viable due to the extreme power and heat involved. As an analogy, nobody would consider using nuclear power in a way that the force of an emplosion be used to move a generator. As there is such extremes of heat produced by lightning, would it be possible/viable to use a thermocouple system to create power? Would there be any other way to use the heat energy rather then the electrical energy of lightning to create power?

 

[ttmark]

No need to capture the energy from the lightning itself... The atmosphere already contains the energy in higher quantities than is in the lightning to begin with. It is also easier to capture the energy directly from the atmosphere as Tesla has already demonstrated over 100 years ago, no new technology is needed.

 

[kyweathergal]

Cliff- Your biggest problem is likely the inductance of the wire itself as a straight piece of wire, much less the wire wound in a coil.

Avoiding the heat problem seems to be a simple problem unless I am missing something ( wouldn't be the first time). The questions I can't answer myself are like these.
will the solenoid accelerate to rapidly (or explode)? How would one arrive @ the optimum weight of the solenoids (goal being to lift the greatest weight possible under control). Any help is appreciated, thanks for your input Cliff.

From; www.lightningrodparts.com/parts1.html
- Standard of the industry for structures less than 75' high.
Catalog Number 1 - 32 strands of 17 gauge bare copper wire in smooth or basket weave configuration. 7/16" diameter, 65,500 circular mil cross section. Weight of copper - 204 lbs. per 1,000' - (Other size cables are available)

Leonardo I am so glad to see others who have an interest in trying to harness lightning as a natural power source. I have had many discussions with my son on this subject. We too are puzzled by how to capture, contain, and store this unique energy and then how to use it. When the pieces of this puzzle fall into place I think our people would be thrust into a whole new way of existence. :)

I have heard that once lightning reaches the ground, it depends on soil content as to how it disperses. i.e. sand for instance, disperses it rather quickly. Clay soil takes longer to disperse this energy. I have often wondered what happens with all that energy. Where does it go? Is it stored in the Earth and therefore next time a storm passes over the land it discharges back into the atmosphere? I know there are downstrokes and upstrokes and that lightning not only comes from up above but also from the ground itself. So is the ground holding the energy in an electro magnetic field in pockets waiting to be released by the friction of the clouds and the other magnetic charges that build up and release from the upper atmosphere? If so, then surely since the Earth can hold onto this energy till it is again released it seems like this in itself is a way to hold lightning as a natural energy. Could there maybe just be a way to tap into that and find a means of discharging the Earth's pool of electro magnetic energy and use it to power things? Wouldn't that be a hoot if all we needed to do to power our vehicles was to have some sort of way to conduct this energy in the ground's surface into the car's power source to get from point A to point B! Wouldn't it be magnificent if all we had to do to power all our other creature comforts was to discharge the energy in the Earth and atmosphere a bit Bzzzt! kinda like static electricity for our lights and microwaves, etc. Something really simple and right in front of our faces could be the answer to all our needs energywise. ;)

 

[mheslep]

...
I have heard that once lightning reaches the ground, it depends on soil content as to how it disperses. i.e. sand for instance, disperses it rather quickly. Clay soil takes longer to disperse this energy. I have often wondered what happens with all that energy. Where does it go? ...

Much of energy goes into ionizing and thus explosively heating the air through which is passes, up to 30,000C per Wiki.

 

[Jiggy-Ninja]

Drawing of geometry proof

That is not a proof. You have divided that angle into 5 segments, but you have not shown that they are equal. (hint: they aren't!) I'm not even a big fan of proofs and I can spot the flaw in that one.

 

[wbeaty]

I have heard that once lightning reaches the ground, it depends on soil content as to how it disperses. i.e. sand for instance, disperses it rather quickly. Clay soil takes longer to disperse this energy. I have often wondered what happens with all that energy. Where does it go?

With lightning, the direction of em energy flow is inwards towards the plasma channel. Before the lightning strike, the energy is stored in strong e-fields between clouds and earth. During the strike, the em energy flows from the e-fields towards the lightning.

Note that the energy doesn't flow along the channel. A lightning channel contains a flow of electricity (charge,) not a flow of energy. Most early textbooks will conflate charge and energy, confusing everyone. Is a flow of electricity called Electric Current? But that 'electricity' cannot be a form of energy, since coulombs aren't joules. "Electricity" becomes impossible to understand unless you can find some animations of the amperes of charge-flow depicted as distinct from the watts of em energy-flow.

During lightning, the charges flow along the channel, while the em (electrical) energy flows inwards towards the channel from the surrounding space. And, after the lightning strike is over, the fields between cloud and ground are weaker, and a hot column of air is left behind. Energy wasn't injected into the ground. It was injected into the miles of lightning channel, creating a hot air column and lots of light and radio waves. To "harness lightning" we'd have to replace a portion of that channel with some sort of man-made device, then create an impedance match between the device and the lightning. That maximizes the rate of energy transfer into the device. During operation, our device would produce an enormous back-EMF which was enough to actually reduce the amperes in the main lightning discharge.

High-volt capacitor discharge is similar to lightning: imagine a spark leaping through the dielectric between the two capacitor plates. The em energy starts out as e-fields stored in the dielectric between the plates. During the spark, the em field-energy between the two plates flows towards the spark. At the same time a large current appears inside the narrow spark. But electric current is not a flow of energy. The energy-flow and the charge-flow have two entirely different pathways.

Heh, the big long-running debate about "the true direction of electric current" is irrelevant in showing us the direction of energy-flow during a spark. The em energy flow resembles a contracting cylinder of onion-layers, with the spark being at the center of this cylinder.

The problem of harnessing lightning is similar to the problem of harnessing the energy in a current-carrying loop of superconductor wire. If the voltage drop along that wire is zero, then we can't extract any em energy. And, without a voltage drop there really is no em energy flowing along the wire in either direction. The energy just sits there in the surrounding magnetic field. To pull out some energy, insert a resistor which produces a voltage-drop, a back-emf, and which causes the value of current to be reduced. Then the em energy will flow into the resistor from both directions along the wire. Essentially the magnetic fields collapse inwards toward the resistor. Analogy: if you rub your thumb against a spinning wheel, the Kinetic Energy of the wheel flows into your thumb, creating frictional heating. End result: halted wheel, hot thumb. Which way did the energy flow? It didn't spin with the wheel. Instead it flowed across the wheel, approaching your thumb from all directions.

 

[aravind.vlb]

until we discover a device or a substance that can sustain large amunt of power across itself within microseconds this is just not possible!what do you think?

 

[msbe]

My thinking is you would be better off if you didn't try to capture the actual power electrically, but allow resistive or other losses to transform it to heat. if temperature was high enough you could produce steam.

 

[malinarn]

after reading through most of this, I only saw one post on hooking up capacitors to a lightning rod to store energy short term. Hooking up capacitors in parallel would allow the charge to spread out and avoid damaging any components due to high current. The current could be stored in the capacitors until the energy companies needed it. You may be saying..."this would be awfully expensive", and yes you would be right. But if we put all our pocket change together and get this started, technology would advance to make this idea more profitable. Companies would form just to build better capacitors just like companies form to build better TVs.

This idea is probably missing some very critical points that my knowledge and experience cannot address. can anyone critique?

 

[Eschersand]

why not just capture the heat energy with salt or something and then convert it to electricity over time?i dunno, guess you would need some sort of ceramic superconductor maybe along the walls of the vessel, with ceramic exponentially increasing resistance lines running inward or something.