Slashdot Mirror
Ask Greg Leyh of The Lightning Foundry What Charges Him Up?
Greg Leyh is an electrical engineer who has spent most of his career working around particle accelerators and high-voltage machinery. Recently Leyh has been working on The Lightning Foundry, a project to see if humans can replicate the voltage economy effect of lightning. With the help of a Kickstarter campaign and a pair of 10-story Tesla Coil towers he hopes to generate man-made lightning. Greg has agreed to take some time away from his lightning machines and answer your questions. Ask as many as you like but please confine your questions to one per post.
Your kickstarter page lists a goal of some $348,000 to do the full experiment as per your cost breakdown. You are now at $32,000 with five days to go meaning some of these components are not going to be affordable. Could you please explain what is being cut or if you're doing the experiment at all?
My work here is dung.
What sensors are you employing to measure this lightning bolt? I don't know much about The Electrum Project or what sort of data it produced for lightning on demand so can you give us very technical details of the sensors in this experiment? Is this more a proof of concept or academic endeavor? Am I missing something on your balance sheet or from Electrum's site about sensors, result sets and data?
My work here is dung.
Who would you rather meet for a day and why?
My work here is dung.
Whats the high voltage high current switching scene like now a days? In ye olden days krytons and friends were thought to be cool, but expensive and export controlled. Now a days do you just import high voltage mosfets from China and call it good, or ...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Aren't tesla coils continuous alternating current and Lightning an almost instantaneous pulse of direct current ? I'm wondering if those differences diminish the usefulness of this experiment.
Great! So generating lightning bolts from gigantic tesla coils might be more efficient if they're ridiculously gigantic instead! What was the point of this again?
A Quick question: How exactly does AC electrical arcs produced by a Tesla coil help us understand the naturally occurring DC lightning produced by clouds?
Are not the two vastly different?
Short format: Are you going for 47 C.F.R. 15 sub B class A or class B? Just kidding, sorta.
Long format: Whats your plans regarding radio interference? Like, are you making a whopping big faraday cage out of an abandoned condo building, or have a FCC exemption under some R+D rule, or ... I'm just picturing armies of angry radio listeners storming your building with pitchforks...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Have you ever been injured working with electricity?
How does your experiment differ from the SIBNIIE and HVRC long-spark experiments? Did you investigate the possibility of using their equipment instead of building your own?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Have you considered a large Van De Graff generator using plastic beads and compressed air?
love is just extroverted narcissism
John V. Karavitis I'm not sure what this guy is trying to accomplish. Is this some kind of experiment into understanding the nature of lightning (don't we already understand how lightning works???), or is he trying to harness the power of lightning for commercial purposes? And what about the link that he provides, that shows a lightning discharge off of what seems like a large transformer? I think that, if someone posts an article or starts a topic thread here, we should at least be given the courtesy of an explanation. Thank you. John Karavitis
Will you be exploring anything along the lines of the Hutchison effects (http://www.rexresearch.com/hutchisn/hutchisn.htm) - and other other odd phenomena? Or are you just sticking to lightning?
What do you mean by "Voltage Economy Effect of Lightning"?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Could you explain a bit more about the possible benefits that mankind could gain from these experiments? Just for us lay-persons who don't really understand high energy physics and its associated terminolgy!
I think there's an underlying Red Alert 2 motivation here.
to see if humans can replicate the voltage economy effect of lightning
Inspired by Hollywood, he's trying to harvest 1.21 gigawatts of bioelectric power per human.
Disclaimer: I'm a rank amateur, so be forewarned: When I was working with Paul Koloc on his erstwhile Plasmak(tm) lightning machine (when I still thought his photographs were real), I came up with a conceptually simple circuit that Paul seemed to think was (conceptually) superior to his simple (DC) capacitor discharge -- except that it was impractical given his mercury switch controls. As usual, you have to have a honking power supply charging a honking capacitor bank with a honking inductor coil ready to roll, but the trick is that at the point in the phase where the capacitor bank has been fully discharged into the inductor, you switch out the capacitor bank and replace it with the spark gap. This, purely DC system seems to better model actual lightning than AC systems doesn't it?
Seastead this.
The hilarious part is watching IT guys, who never get credit for their work when IT stuff doesn't blow up, trash talk the work of lightning protection guys, who also never get credit for their work when stuff doesn't blow up. "Stuff still blows up sometimes anyway" "Its just a wasted expense" "Lightning never hits the same place twice / you never catch the same virus twice" blah blah blah. The ham radio guys are just as bad, ten thousand nearby strikes and no effect on system performance, one strike finally takes it out and "all that stuff is worthless no point even installing it, stuff just blows up anyway". Idiots.
It's no "unscheduled downtime", it's a "upgrade opportunity".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Anonymous Coward Wait who's asking this question? Anonymous Coward
Small Tesla coils are typically run in pulsed mod, with duty cycles on the order of 0.1%. If you wish to run them continuously you need a 100Kw supply for even a small 5-10 foot coil, water cooled electronics, primary coil, and you will need induction heater grade capacitors. How do you plan on getting useful data from high frequency AC, and for that matter, high frequency AC which by nature is a decaying pulse stream on the order of .1-1% duty cycle?
"10-story" says nothing. Are they tall stories or short stories?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
if you don't get successful funding on kickstarter, you get zero dollars and nobody who offered to contribute gets money. Had you read the fucking information at kickstarter, you'd know this.
So I'm assuming funding must be coming from elsewhere.
How are you going to deal with half the population living within a 10 mile range suing you for blowing out their home electronics, and when every ham radio operator within a 1000 mile radius complains to the FCC about you ruining their radio reception?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You are just looking to build the world's largest zeusaphone. I can't blame you of course, but come on, its true isn't it? If not.... you have at least considered it? Maybe play some some megazuesaphone hero?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Can you make your Tesla Coil's play music like in the movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice?! (come on... that's a good question!)
You're just trying to create a very very long discharge? Why? Even on your own website talking about your last project, you don't provide any reasons, or any insights that were gained, you just mention how cool it looked/sounded.
So, relatively simple question. What are you using for a power supply? Specifications? How long does it take to charge the system?
What's the point of this? In other words, why is this worth doing? Is it really cool? Does it do something useful? I have to admit that lightning is kind of boring to me so creating artificial lightning sounds like a sorefest. I'm an EE btw.
No one has thought to ask this?
Greg, are you allowed to tell them about the time Google interviewed you? Do include a link to the video....
Ralf
Your web site seems to describe the goal of the project as understanding how lightning propagates as it forms and how it initiates at a far lower voltage gradient than one would expect from the ionization requirements of air, or (equivalently) jumps gaps far longer than would be expected from the voltage.
I was under the impression that this, along with the jagged nature of the bolt, was already understood. And that it went something like this:
- A large enough charge accumulates, producing a strong field in the direction of a suitable opposing charge. But before the charge becomes large enough to ionize the air and jump the gap:
- A charged particle (typically a primary or secondary cosmic ray) passing through or very near the collection of charge, produces an ionization trail with a component along the voltage gradient.
- Some of the charge rushes to and along the path. This increases (and maintains) the ionization, redistributes the charge in a way that shortens the remaining gap, both increasing and focusing the field, and increses the size of the target for another ionizing particle.
- If another particle comes by before the ionization decays, the process repeats, with charge moving along the new path in the general direction of the opposing charge.
- Repeat until the remaining gap to a conductor, opposing charge accumulation, or similar path of opposite charge coming the other way, is short enough to be ionized by the now very concentrated field.
This explains, not just how an arc can form at far lower voltage gradient than exped, but also the jagged nature of the path (it follows random ionization trails going roughtly the right way), and the occasional forking (when a particle trail joins the extending arc somewhat back from the tip).
Please comment on whether this relates to your work. (I.e. Is this the explanation you're trying to find, confirm-or-falsify, or fill in details on? Are you looking for something else? Something additional?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your website says: "The prototype twin coils often surprise us with wonderfully unexpected behavior, including a strong tendency to couple power wirelessly over large distances."
Surely this is not unexpected behaviour. This is Tesla coils 101!
The reason that lightning has the ability to produce discharges significantly greater than their actual electrical output would suggest is due to the low frequency standing waves present in the atmosphere. It was in fact the interaction of storm derived lightning and these standing waves which enabled Tesla to calculate the correct voltage and frequency required to use the earth and ionosphere as two plates of a capacitor for the "transmission" of wireless power. That was the key to tuning the transmission so that energy loss was only 1-5% as opposed to the insane amount of loss your present coil configuration has according to your paper.
Might also be worth looking into Schumann resonance as this phenomenon is now called. Some NASA people recently put out a paper which suggested to me that they were surprised that the effects of Schumann resonance could be detected beyond the atmosphere. Given the resonant frequency of the waves this should have been obvious. Does nobody actually think for themselves anymore?
Tesla was no magician. He was just a good engineer doing things that had never been done before. Keep at it!
Hi John, The lightning initiation process still confounds experts in the field, which is understandable since the unpredictable nature and high altitude of lightning strikes effectively prohibit any close approach with scientific instruments. Several recent papers [Gurevich, Zybin, Dwyer] propose that ‘relativistic runaway breakdown’ effects might provide lightning with its amazing abilities. One conceivable way to study the lightning initiation process is to try and artificially trigger it. I'm proposing that it’s now arguably practical to build a machine large enough to recreate the conditions that theory predicts will trigger a relativistic runaway breakdown in air, on demand, and in a well-instrumented environment. More info on the project can be viewed here: http://www.lod.org/Projects/LightningFoundry/LightningFoundry.html Let me know if you'd like any more info. -Greg Leyh
Twinkle, twinkle little volt
So far from your lightning bolt
To your anode in the sky
We will watch your sparkles fly
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
For instance, if you take a few BMOD0063 P125 B04/B08s each rated at 63F, 125V and maximum discharge current of 1,800A (energy capacity of (0.5 * [63 * farad]) * (125 * [volt^2]) ? joule = 3937.5 J) and discharged it into a 2000uH air core inductor ((0.5 * [2000 * {micro*henry}]) * ([1800 * ampere]^2) ? joule = 3240 J) might you not get the equivalent of a small car crash discharged at millions of volts by timing the switchout of the capacitor bank correctly?
Seastead this.