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Re: Ball lightning - Terry's thoughts....

Original poster: Scott Stephens <scottxs@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Tesla list wrote:

Yeah, incandescent air. If you capture such a plasmoid in an inverted
pyrex cup, it turns pink-violet

I can dig up a reference to an article, I think I posted it before, about how to use an oil-lamp glass chimney in a microwave to trap a plasma, without it heating and breaking the glass.

I once tried some sulfur crystals in the inverted cup
with the plasmoid, hoping to duplicate the "sulfur microwave light bulb"
device, but it made clouds of sulfur dioxide or some other acrid gas.

No doubt. The sulfur lamps I believe are high-pressure, perhaps 50 atmospheres. Best get some sapphire (alumina) tubing. An old high-pressure sodium bulb?

Most magnetron power supplies are somewhere above 5 kilovolts. I don't
know what the antenna output voltage might be, but if it's in the low
kilovolts and the hi Q is stepping it up, the fields are already near the
breakdown threshold for air

Yes, the magnetron works on 4 KV, but I'm pretty sure the Q of the cavity is much higher than the waveguide and oven cavity. I googled found this 2 KV/M. Check out the article, "Microwave Mischief and Madness" }8-D

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=21&url=http%3A//physicsed.buffalostate.edu/pubs/TPT/TPTMay02Microwave/TPTMay02MicrowaveOrig.pdf&ei=vRkAQ7KqEcSCYerL7J4H

"For example, small pieces of metal placed in an electric field of 2kV/m and separated from on another by only 1 cm ...(20,000 V) will produce a spark discharge in the microwave"

The article, as do most microwave-fun sites cite you. You're quite famous.

Found this: http://www.ee.ualberta.ca/icops2002/programtest/7B.htm#_7B09:
Plasmas can fly off certain rocks.

The actual cavity in the magnetron is probably has around 4kV/cm, the field in the oven is around 2 kV / m. So there's quite a step down in impedance. The metal nob on the magnetron looks like a 1/4 wave coupling to the waveguide.

Here's some weirdness: about 15 minutes after running a brilliant
microwave argon-gas plasmoid in a 5" round-bottom flask, I noticed that
the flask looked yellow against a white tabletop: aguely the look of
bromine gas. There was a mashed-kleenex stopper in the flask. So I blew
into the flask with a plastic soda straw and the yellow vanished. I
carefully sniffed around and got a strong nose-burn scent, but nothing
recognizable. Was it something from the bit of aluminum that triggered
the plasma? Or perhaps air contamination made some oxides of nitrogen?
They're supposedly reddish brown. But maybe they'd look yellow when
dilute.

Yep, I suspect nitrogen oxides. I can distinguish the pungent aromas of bromine, chlorine, chlorine dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone. All vicious, noxious gases, but all unique. Lightning makes nitrogen oxides, I don't see why the plasma wouldn't.

Scott