Ask Greg Leyh of The Lightning Foundry What Charges Him Up? 88
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.
Looks Like a Lofty Kickstarter Goal (Score:5, Interesting)
have you never used kickstarter before? (Score:3)
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.
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Measurements and Devices? (Score:2)
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The polarity observation could be consistent with the relative difficulty of producing -ve streamers compared to +ve streamers. +ve streamers are generally produced at a lower E-field than -ve. It is possible you are seeing this preferential breakdown behaviour in your current results.
Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla? (Score:1)
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Why? Edison was a great big asshole, Tesla wasn't. Easy choice. Mod me Informative.
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modern switching tech? (Score:2)
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 ...
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Differences (Score:1)
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You can send a single pulse into a tesla coil at resonant freq, err resonant period anyway, no problemo. It certainly reduces the heating problem.
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It also makes it do bugger all (I suspect that is what you were suggesting re "heat problem"). The whole point of running it resonant is to build up the voltage in multiple "stages". What you are suggesting would be like kicking once on a swing and leaving it at that. That'll be a boring swing!
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Great plan! (Score:1)
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?
AC/DC (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
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FCC and friends (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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Yeah its called "the cell phone" or "the smartphone" or whatever. Also wifi, wireless ISPs, satellite TV, etc.
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My "couple kilowatt" buzz box arc welder is a couple orders of magnitude lower peak power, arc length is a couple orders of magnitude lower, operating freq is 60 hz two orders of magnitude lower, and I can knock out all radio communication for quite a distance with it... The point being that specs won't save you, design will save you, since something much smaller is much worse. So the specific electrical engineering design elements of how you make a lightning generator make ten or so orders of magnitude l
Ash Eyebrows (Score:2)
Have you ever been injured working with electricity?
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SIBNIIE & HVRC experiments (Score:4, Informative)
How does your experiment differ from the SIBNIIE and HVRC long-spark experiments? [capturedlightning.com] Did you investigate the possibility of using their equipment instead of building your own?
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Van De Graff (Score:2)
Have you considered a large Van De Graff generator using plastic beads and compressed air?
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I'm not sure I understand what this guy is trying (Score:3, Interesting)
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Future experiments (Score:1)
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It would be great if anyone could reproduce the Hutchison effects. :-|
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tl;dr - wtf? (Score:2)
Benefits? (Score:1)
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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 wor
not saying it's the propper attitude.. (Score:2)
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".
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True, for some businesses it's the ONLY upgrade opportunity.
I wish I was kidding. The smallish company my dad works at has this sorry old Xeon server that absolutely CRAWLS. Takes 10 minutes to shut down, not kidding. The guy who runs the place is too much of a horrible cheap bastard to upgrade it.
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Traditionally giant lightning generators are used to develop lightning protection.
Is that what this project is aiming for, because it seems strange that a person would have to use a crowd-funding model to fund research into a health and safety issue, that one would assume the likes of G.E. or Philips or some other multi-national would be able to do much more comprehensibly?
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Is that what this project is aiming for, because it seems strange that a person would have to use a crowd-funding model to fund research into a health and safety issue, that one would assume the likes of G.E. or Philips or some other multi-national would be able to do much more comprehensibly?
I donno, but I know these facilities are expensive, and imagine where electronics would be if only G.E. could afford to own a soldering iron... or a C compiler...
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I'm a senior scientist in the lightning testing facility of Cobham Plc (which use to be known as Culham Lightning). We predominantly perform aerospace testing for the major european aircraft manufacturers. The aerospace lightning standards, such as ED-84, could not be practically achieved using a tesla coil arrangement. The current/voltage levels and waveforms shapes are very specific to simulate the effects of a one in a thousand (typically positive) natural lightning strike. These waveforms are easiest to
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*turned = tuned
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True and your facilities work is valuable, but, maybe the first part of a development cycle could be done cheaply with a "zap it and sniff for smoke" methodology at a small facility.
If your device can't survive a small scale tesla coil, no point hooking it up to a calibrated high power high expense facility like yours.
For example, several decades ago, I pulled cable for RS-232 cables for a specific model of VAX, which was famous (at least at our facility) for blowing out its rs232 line receivers if you touc
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Generally, you will find that the low-level surge testing is done in-house during development, especially by the larger electronics companies. This would be the wack it, smell it test (or more precisely - measure to see if any inboard transients occur that will damage stuff you want kept alive). We cater for the higher threat level requirements where the cost of the test equipment starts to become prohibitive and the test experience is of significant value (we advise on mitigation). Even for this aspect of
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One thing you have to bare in mind is a lot of companies are utterly allergic to spending more money on something than they have to - they want to know they are passing the standard at minimal cost, rather than risking spending money on something that may be unnecessary - one reason all the standards have a good margin of safety. As a tesla could not meet the standard, it would not realistically be considered. A cheap LCR circuit, a charge pump and a solid state switch would cost a similar amount and do exa
DC? (Score:3)
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Let me rephrase the question (Score:2)
For instance, if you take a few BMOD0063 P125 B04/B08 [maxwell.com]s 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
10 what? (Score:2)
"10-story" says nothing. Are they tall stories or short stories?
Liability? (Score:2)
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?
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Actually, not sure if the FCC can do much there. I remember looking into this when I was coiling and the advice that I always got was that the FCC bans jamming, but... radio equipment is not specifically protected from interference from the operation of other equipment. So the basic rule was that a tesla coil was "probably ok" but modulating the frequency to transmit radio signals, is certainly disallowed.
Not sure how this would apply to a zeusaphone, which is definitely modulated, and I hear can be picked
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Actually.... I want to expand on your liability question....and maybe scare some socks off....
So, about 15 years ago, when I built my coil, I got to know another local coiler (I still drool over the pole transformer in his basement). At that time, he told me of an incident that he alleged happened to a friend of his. Basically, he was down in his basement running his coil, when someone upstairs smelled smoke. I don't remember much more to the middle of the story but, the ending was a bit scary....
A sweater
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Ok admit it.... (Score:2)
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?
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I thought "voltage economy" was understood. (Score:2)
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
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Cool. Thanks.
Volts (Score:2)
Twinkle, twinkle little volt
So far from your lightning bolt
To your anode in the sky
We will watch your sparkles fly