Would it be technologically possible to capture the electricity in lightning?
LINK TO COLUMN: Do lightning rods really work? - The Straight Dope
Would it be technologically possible to capture the electricity in lightning?
LINK TO COLUMN: Do lightning rods really work? - The Straight Dope
You can’t just “capture” electricity; it has to go somewhere. And in order to get the energy from lightning, you have only a fraction of a second to respond in. That pretty much eliminates all methods involving motors (such as pumping up a reservoir) or chemical batteries. For a moment I thought something might be possible involving fused copper being dumped into water, but the obvious question then arises, “How do you recover the copper for reuse?”
Some sort of lightning rod with gaps to be bridged by sparks, the gaps surrounded by photovoltaic cells, might recover some energy, I suppose, but I don’t think it would work economically.
Take it out of the water?
Not sure what you mean. Using the right material you could generate a lot of heat briefly and recover that, but it’s not a very reliable source of energy.
Leaving you with a useless blob of copper, which then has to be remelted and reforged into a sacrificial bar to be melted again. But that’s going to take a large part of the energy you obtained in the first place.
Quite a lot of heat, indeed. The problem is the tech to keep that heat from destroying the apparatus. At first I had the idea of taking advantage of that by accepting the destruction and using the melted mass of copper to heat water to drive a turbine, but then, as I pointed out, there’s the problem of recovering the copper.
It’s sort of like trying to solve the longstanding problem of fusion energy by simply putting a cap on an H-bomb.
Ok, sounds like your imagining the copper as being a vertical lightening rod, and then it melts into a puddle. But you get lay it in down horizontally and dump it in the water that way so it forms something still somewhat bar shaped, or just pour the water over it. I’d think you’d want something more like a lump anyway, made of a more resistive material that won’t melt, with a good conductor running into it, and another one out. Then pour water over it.
At the very end, Cecil says there was to be am NFPA meeting in October 2001. Any follow-up on that?
You could have a spherical boiler, when lighting hits, you get steam, which is then fed into a turbine to provide power. That’d be the best way using current technology and is actually very probable.
Any other method I can think of, however possible with todays technology, is not very feasible.
I think the problem is getting all that juice to run through a resistive material and generate heat instead of traveling around it to the nearest ground.
I thought about that too. As, it has to be grounded, and up high, in order to have a statistical advantage over the ground. Lightening strikes occur over a short period of time so having s “gound lift” relay in place would probably not work. You could put the sphere on an insulated column, have an insulated water pipe within the column, with there being a copper pipe in the base to make contact with the ground. That way, the energy travelling would be through the water.
This might have to use a different mechanism to generate electricty. Yes, the water will become steam, but probably within the sphere itself and push the water column down. You could then use a turbine, like from hydroelectric dams, but smaller.
This is so late 19th, early 20th, century, Tesla-isk idea.
They have an updated standard from 2011.
Most everybody seems to have misunderstood the question: Do lightning rods work? It seems to have been assumed that lightning rods were intended to “ward off lightning”, but that is not their purpose or function. They do not have a magical function. Ben Frankling was not into magical machinery!
In case of a lightning strke, lightning rods and the coductor attached to them conduct the electricity to the ground, so that it will not cause a fire or otherwise destroy the building. They are to protect the building from the harmful effects of a lightning strike, not to prevent a lightning strikes, and they work very well.
Who seems to have that misunderstanding?
lightning bolts have a huge amount of energy to dissipate. a bolt splits into a number of points to get rid of all that energy. a bolt won’t hit a tip of a lightning rod and also not hit the roof and other parts of the building.
No intention of a hijack, but I heard that lightning may start from the earth and go up to the sky. Any truth to that?
Slow motion videos I’ve seen show a very faint leader moving from the ground up into the sky. At some point a connection to the stepped leader from the cloud is made and the main stroke drops to the ground. It would be difficult for the naked eye to see anything but the main stroke.
A Web search for “slow motion lightning video” will provide some interesting videos.
I searched, I saw. Very enlightening! Thanks GaryM.
Except that Franklin’s lightning rod was not grounded, but was meant to divert the charge away. The Bohemian inventor of the lightning rod, Father Diviš, did ground the rod.
That’s one theory. The other theory (and why they’re pointy rather than a ball) is to dissapate the charge by emitting ions, preventing a charge buildup that would draw a lightning strike in the first case.
But since there isn’t any science to show whether (a) they’re effective, or (b) if effective, what the principle is, we’re all just guessing here.
It’s stated in the column:
Ah ok. I thought he was referring to this thread.