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Huge Tesla Coils Will Recreate Natural Lightning

Posted by samzenpus on from the warm-up-the-lightning-cannon dept.

jjp9999 writes "In order to study the nature of lighting, the team at Lightning on Demand (LOD) plans to build two, ten-story-tall Tesla coils—the largest ever—that will blast arcs of lightning hundreds of feet in length. LOD founder Greg Leyh said the project aims to reveal details on the initiation process of natural lightning, an area that remains a mystery, since smaller generated arcs have more trouble breaking through the air. It is believed that 'laboratory-scale electric arcs start to gain lightning-like abilities once they grow past about 200ft in length,' according to the LOD website, and so the team hopes to build Tesla coils large enough to do this. According to Leyh, 'Understanding how lightning forms [and grows] is the first step towards being able to control where lightning strikes or being able to suppress it completely in certain areas.'"

3 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Wasn't this mentioned a week ago? by CronoCloud · · Score: 5, Informative

    Isn't this essentially a dupe of:

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/11/17/1540235/working-on-man-made-lightning

  2. This story is everywhere in the last two weeks by mark_reh · · Score: 5, Informative

    and it's wrong. Tesla coils produce high frequency -i.e AC- discharges at very high voltage and very low current. Lightning, on the other hand is a DC or very low frequency phenomenon combining extremely high voltages with extremely high currents. The currents are so high that they instantaneously heat the air and produce a loud boom- you may have heard it before- it's called thunder.

    If he really wanted to duplicate lightning he'd charge up some big capacitors to extremely high voltages and draw arcs between their terminals. THAT would be a better simulation of lightning than the output of any Tesla coil.

    Major props to the guy for marketing his idea. It's been picked up by every news agency from here to Mumbai. I'm sure he'll get the funding he needs to go through with the project.

  3. Re:Should Siberia evacuate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tesla's bad assery far exceeds the Tunguska myth. He figured out how to turn our great big ball of iron surrounded by an electrostatic atmosphere into a giant fucking power source. He knew burning fossil fuels was a bad idea 100 years ago before anyone ever conceived it would be an issue.

    If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations.

    He was trying to hand us a solution to problems we didn't even have yet and give us technology not unlike the telecommunications we have today 100 years ago! He even told us how to fucking do it when he filed a patent on the process.

    But hey, maybe these guys are on to his work and just needed a cover story to get funding for their own Wardenclyffe tower. One can only hope...