A Cell Tower In the Swiss Alps Is Struck By Lightning More Than 100 Times a Year (ieee.org) 90
Wave723 quotes IEEE Spectrum: Atop a rocky peak in the Swiss Alps sits a telecommunications tower that gets struck by lightning more than 100 times a year, making it perhaps the world's most frequently struck object. Taking note of the remarkable consistency with which lightning hits this 124-meter structure, researchers have adorned it with instruments for a front-row view of these violent electric discharges...
To anyone who has witnessed a lightning strike, everything seems to happen all at once. But [New Mexico Tech's Mark] Stanley's sensor captures several gigabytes of data about the many separate pulses that occur within each flash. Those data can be made into a video that replays, microsecond by microsecond, how "channels" of lightning form in the clouds.... [T]hey intend to use data gathered by the tower's many instruments (which include a collection of six antennas called a lightning mapping array, two Rogowski coils to measure current, two B-Dot sensors to measure the current time-derivative, broadband electric and magnetic field sensors, and a high-speed camera) to reconstruct the total path of strikes soon after they happen, tracing the electromagnetic radiation all the way back to its original source...
The Santis team's work has held particular relevance for wind farm operators. That's because most strikes recorded at the tower are examples of upward lightning -- which travels from ground-to-cloud instead of cloud-to-ground.
They hope to eventually help make progress on predicting where lightning will strike.
And by the end of this year, the team at the tower expect to record their 1,000th lightning strike.
To anyone who has witnessed a lightning strike, everything seems to happen all at once. But [New Mexico Tech's Mark] Stanley's sensor captures several gigabytes of data about the many separate pulses that occur within each flash. Those data can be made into a video that replays, microsecond by microsecond, how "channels" of lightning form in the clouds.... [T]hey intend to use data gathered by the tower's many instruments (which include a collection of six antennas called a lightning mapping array, two Rogowski coils to measure current, two B-Dot sensors to measure the current time-derivative, broadband electric and magnetic field sensors, and a high-speed camera) to reconstruct the total path of strikes soon after they happen, tracing the electromagnetic radiation all the way back to its original source...
The Santis team's work has held particular relevance for wind farm operators. That's because most strikes recorded at the tower are examples of upward lightning -- which travels from ground-to-cloud instead of cloud-to-ground.
They hope to eventually help make progress on predicting where lightning will strike.
And by the end of this year, the team at the tower expect to record their 1,000th lightning strike.
Predicting where lightning will strike? (Score:5, Funny)
That's a pretty easy one. I predict it will hit this one cell tower in the Swiss Alps.
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If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a ~hilltop~ Swiss Alp in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'
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âoeYou canâ(TM)t really go to a company and find an instrument thatâ(TM)s built just for studying lightning,â says Bill Rison, Stanleyâ(TM)s collaborator who teaches electrical engineering at New Mexico Tech. âoeYou have to build your own.â
I guess they haven't heard of companies like Boltek, or to give them their full name, Boltek Lightning Detection Systems [boltek.com]. Or, if you prefer the DIY approach, things like Blitzortung [blitzortung.org].
Cambridge University Library (Score:3)
How do we harvest it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like that's quite a bit of power if we can harvest it. At least it should be enough to run the tower.
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:4, Interesting)
In this particular case, having lightning strike the tower seems to be easy. In other cases it is a problem. The next problem to deal with is the time during which the energy in the lightning is delivered. While I am no physicist, I believe lightning is measured in milliseconds, possibly microseconds. You would thus have, at best, a few thousandths of a second to do something with the energy. That strikes (pun intended) me as being a seriously difficult problem! Can you charge a battery to any significant degree in such a short time? Or do anything else even vaguely useful?
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Building a capacitor that can handle the millions of volts of a lightning strike is going to be problematic.
But let's suppose you end up with a charge, how are you going bring down these millions of volts to something useful?
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:4, Interesting)
You spread it across thousands of capacitors in parallel, duh. Where are all the nerds at? No one here understands basic EE.
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So you have thousands of capacitors holding millions of volts each. It might be a few seconds before the next strike, or it might be a couple of weeks. Now what?
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Und now we fire ze death ray!
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So you have thousands of capacitors holding millions of volts each. It might be a few seconds before the next strike, or it might be a couple of weeks. Now what?
You dump it off the capacitor into a giant inductor. The capacitor is just there because the inductor current rises slightly too slow to capture lightning.
Once in the inductor there is no trouble, you have lots of time to extract the power; it follows an inverse square law! (Faraday's Law)
Also, the capacitors hold whatever voltage you want, because you can arrange them in parallel and also in series. And if they have large capacity, they won't reach the applied voltage. Voltage and current are just perspect
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:4, Interesting)
You spread it across thousands of capacitors in parallel, duh. Where are all the nerds at? No one here understands basic EE.
Umm... according to "basic EE", that would be capacitors in series. And ignoring the other huge challenges for the moment, that's still a bitch of a charge balancing problem.
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I thought the tradition was to use Leyden jars.
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:4, Informative)
You spread it across thousands of capacitors in parallel, duh.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spread it across thousands of capacitors in series. That way, after the lightning strike, you can switch them over to parallel, have have only thousands of volts, rather than millions of volts, which makes it somewhat easier to deal with.
Why bother? (Score:2)
But let's suppose you end up with a charge, how are you going bring down these millions of volts to something useful?
Same way you do it coming down from a cross-country DC transmission line, but with a taller stack of semiconductors, would be one option. Switching regulator ditto - with or without transformer, would be one or two more.
But why bother? Sure it's megawatts. But it's megawatts for a fraction of a second. One lightning stroke is about 14 killowatt hours. Maybe a bucks worth of power, depend
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There's not actually all that much energy in lightning (pleanty of power however.) If you takes googles suggested 1GJ / strike then thats only 278 kW / hours, or about £35 worth at retail price (and significantly less at wholesale) even if you could store it you'd need to havest a strike every three weeks or so per household, so anything larger than a village would need 24 / 7 rolling thunderstorms.
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That strikes (pun intended) me as being a seriously difficult problem!
Well, the standard way we make generators is to heat some water to turn a turbine.
Since the lightning is so brief, there will be challenges heating any large volume of water to a useful degree.
The obvious solution seems to be installing the lightning rods into shallow kiddie pools.
Use the brief flash of steam to jump start some very large turbine rotors.
Once the large turbines overcome their rest mass, the billions of hamsters in tiny wheels all trying to run towards the delicious child bodies should be abl
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:5, Informative)
We just need a leyden jar the size of a building...
It's not that hard to capture some of the power from a lightning strike - it's capturing very much of it that's a challenge. You've got around 300kWh delivered over 30us, with an average peak power of around 10TW. That kind of power flow tends to vaporize electrical components. And the cost for something that won't be vaporized is going to need a LOT of lightning strikes per year to be cost-effective. There has been some research into using lasers to produce plasma channels to guide lightning through the air to receivers though.
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Probably actually in a desert behind the mountain. A mountaintop gets a lot of strikes in one exact spot, but desert electrical storms have many more strikes, and you can cause them to hit a piece of metal fairly easily.
So it would have a nice "looking over the mountain into Mordor" type of effect.
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oh suddenly *that's* too complicated, but colonizing mars and orbital solar arrays are just a question of the right firmware in your 3d printer...
Re:How do we harvest it? (Score:5, Interesting)
And the cost for something that won't be vaporized is going to need a LOT of lightning strikes per year to be cost-effective. There has been some research into using lasers to produce plasma channels to guide lightning through the air to receivers though.
I remember years ago reading about lightning prevention arrays being installed at CATV stations in Lightning Alley - their purpose was to discharge the cloud-to-ground potential before it built up to the point of arcing. Apparently you could view the installation from a distance and see lightning strikes all around the station, but not at the station. I wonder if it would be possible to do that on a larger scale and harness the much-better-controlled cloud-to-ground current to charge capacitor banks or batteries. There would still be some huge engineering challenges, (including handling the inevitable full-on lightning strikes that would occasionally occur), but it might be a problem worth tackling.
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could a thermal storage solution be used instead? (after all, it can make a tree explode by instantly boiling its water)
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While I can appreciate the engineering challenge of capturing a lightning bolt - is there any other reason to try to do this? Financial feasibility doesn't seem to make sense.
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Agreed, capturing a single lightning bolt probably isn't worth the effort. On the other hand, if you're someplace that experiences frequent thunderstorms, and could somehow capture most of the bolts that would otherwise strike over an area of many square miles... it might add up to something useful.
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Oddly enough, enough people have thought about this that it has it's own wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]
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I think that if you got to the point that you captured enough of it (i.e. making the electricity that's travelling through actually do useful work), that it would no longer be a path of least resistance and, hence, it would likely arc around/away from the capture equipment.
Unless you can have some superconducting thing plugged into a huge capacitor capable of taking millions of volts at ridiculous currents instantly and then ekeing them out over a period of time... I'm not sure it's going to work even then.
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Looks like that's quite a bit of power if we can harvest it. At least it should be enough to run the tower.
Take some rechargeable D cells. Attach a wire to each end. In a thunderstorm, take the D cells to the middle if a wide-open field. Ground one end of the wires off the D cells. Attach the other wire to a long metal pole.
Hold pole upright. You may need both hands if it gets windy.
Let us know how it turns out.
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That's nothing (Score:2)
...gets struck by lightning more than 100 times a year, making it perhaps the world's most frequently struck object.
I live about 1000' from the CN Tower in Toronto. I've seen it sustain 100 hits in one storm many times. 100/year is no big deal.
Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Informative)
According to the website [cntower.ca], it is only hit 75 times a year on average. I'm sure there are places that get more thunderstorms then Toronto.
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I've heard the St. Louis Arch get struck about a dozen times during a thunderstorm. It Brrrrrrriinnnggggssss it when it is hit!
That's nothing (Score:2)
Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Funny)
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He can buy more in a NY minute, which is apparently 11 seconds.
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A man in New York is mugged every 11 seconds
Pfft, that's nothing!
The human body produces on average two million new red blood cells every second.
We can 412 bushels of corn every second.
And you'll never guess now many nuclear decay particle interactions per second occurred in generating the electricity I'm wasting by posting this (it's a lot!)
The moral of the story: we should never lose sight of the important fact that you can never have enough nuclear powered corn inside your blood cells while being mugged in new york during a lightning storm.
Interesting Article (Score:5, Insightful)
i seen lightning hit a few things close up (Score:2)
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That's true, but it's also unpredictable. Some people have survived being hit by lightning.
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Roy Sullivan [wikipedia.org] survived being hit by lightning 7 times.
All Ready Exists (Score:1)
how about using to capture lightening? (Score:2)
Save the cell tower! (Score:2)
Does the nearest village have a dishevelled-looking woman going around accosting pedestrians on behalf of the Santis Preservation Society?
Cheaper than layoffs (Score:2)
Here's your tin foil hat.Trust me, you'll need it.
Benjamin Franklin ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on his research into electricity, Franklin was granted scientific awards and honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale. As a result, he was welcomed by the French royalty (commoners were not welcomed into court) and he successfully lobbied them for support for the American Revolution. So if it wasn't for lightning, the USA would be speaking English today.
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Put several cell towers around the lightning rod to protect it from being stuck by lightning.
(an expensive transistor will blow first to protect the cheap fuse)
Almost as bad... (Score:2)
When we were living in S. OH, the substation that fed the southern part of town was a likely target every time a thunderstorm passed through town. It was a safe bet that, if the forecast was for thunderstorms, we were going to lose power that day. Columbus and Southern's decision to put that substation on the top of a hill ju-u-ust might have been a bad one. (On par with their decision to save money by cutting back on tree trimming. Because how could a winter storm possibly have an effect on electrical serv
free energy (Score:1)
But...but? (Score:2)