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.

Comments

Looks Like a Lofty Kickstarter Goal

[eldavojohn]

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?

Re:Looks Like a Lofty Kickstarter Goal

[Greg Leyh]

Hi, If the KS campaign doesn’t reach the goal, then we’re simply back where we started. You don’t get a dime unless you reach your goal in the allotted time. You can be sure though that we'll keep working on the design, and looking for ways to score the materials. -Greg Leyh

FCC and friends

[vlm]

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...

Re:FCC and friends

[Greg Leyh]

The Lightning Foundry coils won’t be a significant source of radiated power since the operating frequency will be only 5200Hz. This wavelength [about 36 miles] is *very* long compared to the tower height, so the radiation efficiency is almost zero. In addition, since the towers operate 180deg out of phase, their electric fields will tend to cancel at a distance. While operating Electrum at full power, a person viewing a TV one block away was not able to discern whether the coil was on or not by watching the picture quality. Of greater concern is the potential acoustic noise. The Lightning Foundry arcs could easily produce over 100kilowatts of acoustic power. To deal with this and general safety concerns we plan to operate the Lightning Foundry in a remote, mountainous section of southern Nevada, about 10mi from Boulder Dam.

Ash Eyebrows

[Anne_Nonymous]

Have you ever been injured working with electricity?

SIBNIIE & HVRC experiments

[GameboyRMH]

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?

Re:SIBNIIE & HVRC experiments

[Greg Leyh]

The Lightning Foundry differs from SIBNIIE in that we’ll be focusing on relativistic breakdown effects, and how they might correlate with observations taken from natural lightning strikes. SIBNIIE and HVRC accomplished an amazing range of research. As I understand it, most of their research was directed towards developing Extremely High Voltage transmission lines for transporting the plentiful hydroelectric power from distant northern Siberia. I believe that SIBNIIE was the first facility to generate what is called a ‘superlong discharge’, which is shown in your link. I haven’t come across a solid explanation for superlong discharges, nor do I know if they’re related to relativistic breakdown effects. However the SIBNIIE Marx did generate more than enough voltage to produce relativistic electrons. I do think there's some very interesting physics going on there that's worth pursuing.

I'm not sure I understand what this guy is trying

[JohnVKaravitis]

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

Re:Benefits?

[vlm]

Traditionally giant lightning generators are used to develop lightning protection. For power companies, radio companies, telcos, aircraft, etc.

1) Design and build a model or life size machine that you think will survive a lightning bolt

2) Zap the heck out of it with artificial lightning

3) Did blow up? If so, analyze how it failed and go back to step 1

4) Did not blow up? Profit !!!!

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.

DC?

[Baldrson]

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?

have you never used kickstarter before?

[poetmatt]

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.