[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: (Bill's experience) was Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....

Original poster: Terry Fritz <vardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Bill,

Was it 75 joules or 75,000 joules? The capacitor and arc look bigger than 0.042uF for 75 joules at 60kV. I am thinking you had a 43uF 60kV cap for 75,000 joules? I always thought the arc got back into the AC line somehow and fried the neighborhood. If it was "just radiated" power that did the damage, that is truly impressive!!! ;-)) It could have jumped up the local "ground potential" high too. I think you once mentioned that it blew a neighbor's porch light bulb right out of the socket =:O

It is interesting to consider the energy of a short section of a lightning channel. Maybe 100,000 amps, 100,000 volts for 1/2 second. A staggering 5 BILLION joules!!!!!! A 100kV cap at 1 FARAD!! With a 10kW charging system, it would take over two hours to charge!!! 65,000 times bigger than your arc in 1981!! Assuming blast effects fall of as a cubic function, about 40X the explosion. But my time frame is far far longer....

"If 5,000,000,000 joules won't make ball lightning, nothing will" ;-)) The biggest "banger" I know of is the Z-machine at Sandia:

http://www.sandia.gov/media/images/Z02.gif

http://www.sandia.gov/media/images/jpg/Z02.jpg   (Big image)

http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm

But it is very high speed at "some nanoseconds" and "only a measly" 2 million joules :-p But the neutron radiation in the DI water pool is sure pretty!! I see you have a swimming pool in many of your pictures, but I bet your neighbors would not like you to turn it into a neutron pulse reactor ;O)))

So it would seem that the raw energy we need for our ball lightning maker is so enormous that the average person is just not going to get there...

However,.... I was thinking we could just let "nature" power it:

http://hot-streamer.com/temp/BL-Machine.gif

The lightning rod would just direct the strike across a spark gap with some target material, like a charcoal bricket, in the gap. One would have to trigger the cameras and such at nature's whim... This would be within the abilities of a "slightly" less than sane amateur experimenter with a big back yard in a lighting prone area... Sort of a ball lightning experimental station... It would not be much worse that a HAM radio antenna in lightning territory and it should be fairly neighbor safe. The key is that the "pulsewidth" is like 1/2 second so the giant peak powers are fairly low limiting local high-speed pulse damage.

It is interesting to note that Tesla's lab in Colorado Springs basically had this situation. A tall conductive pole that was insulated at the base by a large air gap. If lightning struck that pole and the arc went across something "organic", maybe Tesla had an "epiphany" during a lightning hit about ball lighting...

All this is wild conjecture of course.... It "should" be possible to make ball lightning with much more modest power levels... But it think we need to learn to crawl before we can run....

Cheers,

        Terry



At 04:06 PM 8/8/2005, you wrote: 
Terry and all,
I did just the same thing as you wrote below...back in 1981.  D.C. Cox
was there to witness it.  He took the picture of the "man-made" lightning
bolt that resullted.  You see, instead of the Model 10 coil causing
the 1" coaxial spark gap at the top of the capacitor to "trigger", all
the stored energy (some 75 joules) decided to "dump" into the
Tesla coil arc channel.  You can see this picture on my web site at:
http://www.ttr.com.  Click on "History making images". From that page,
click on the top listing.  What I ended up doing was creating an
(unintended and rather very large) EMP.  I wiped out everyone's
electrical devices (including many of mine) for a radius of about 3
houses in all directions (that was VERY expensive)!  Not having a
large Faraday shielded room available, in which to repeat the
experiment and expand on the concept, I never repeated it again.
What appears to have happened is that the surge current from the
capacitor drained up the Tesla coil arc channel, down through the
secondary coil, and finally to ground.  I believe this surge current
created "forced" harmonic oscillations in the secondary coil, that
then raced out in all directions as an electromagnetic field.  Heck,
that pulse even took out 300 MHz PCM wireless transmitters, that
used to be a part of my security alarm system...every one of them!
(Also VERY EXPENSIVE)!
Best regards,
Bill Wysock.




Date sent:                 Sat, 06 Aug 2005 21:14:13 -0600
To:                            tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
From:                        "Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:                    Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....
Forwarded by:          tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Date forwarded:       Sat,  6 Aug 2005 21:17:28 -0600 (MDT)
> Original poster: Terry Fritz <vardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> One would need a capacitor, of the can crusher variety, that could
> supply 500K amp currents and a Tesla coil to initiate the "arc over"
> (needs big voltage).
>
> So you put your organic material between the electrodes of the can
> crusher style super current capacitors and initiate the power arc to
> the material with the Tesla coil...
>
> Just that simple....
>
> Cheers,
>
>          Terry
>
>