Cosmic Capacitors - Nov 11 2010

[rjhuntington]

Stephen Smith begins his excellent article with, "Capacitors store and release electric current." Since we are all about the electric part of universal reality, please allow me to split an electrical engineering hair and say that what a capacitor stores is charge, and then at some point releases the charge as current in the circuit to which the capacitor is connected.

Earth is a celestial capacitor charged by the solar wind. The rocky planet body is one plate of the capacitor, the ionosphere is the other plate, and the atmosphere is the dielectric. As with any capacitor, the charge is stored in the dielectric. The relative charge increases with the dielectric distance from the "ground" plate. For Earth, that means a charge of some 100 to 500 volts per meter in clear weather, up to many thousands of volts per meter in stormy conditions.

Lightning is the shorting of the dielectric due to over-voltage. Such phenomena are always localized, even in a tiny capacitor. The breakdown always occurs in a specific location. In actuality, there is charge separation even in the atmosphere, as lightning discharge occurs in a stratified fashion from one layer to another, ultimately reaching the ionosphere. Lightning bolts appear "right-side up" or "inverted" depending on which layer is discharging and where.

(The old tale of lightning being static discharge caused by the friction of air molecules rubbing against each other in stormy conditions is silly on the face of it. If that were so, any windy conditions would cause lightning. Since they don't, it isn't.)

The fact of Earth's being a giant fully-charged capacitor suggests that there is abundant free power available at all times waiting to be tapped. Use of wind mills, photovoltaic cells, and other costly alternatives may eventually fade for power production since the atmosphere already contains more power than we could possibly use and is being constantly replenished by the sun.

The article at this link proves the concept.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/energy21/c ... harger.htm

[MrAmsterdam]

http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/energy21/c ... harger.htm

Just about every Ham operator knows better than to disconnect an antenna and then pick it up later by the connector and touch a ground. Enormous charges can build up on an insulated wire and the longer the wire the more charge that will build. Most all of us have learned to pick up the coax and tap or hold the antenna against the case of the radio to bleed off this charge. How few of us have ever been so poor as to have to think about how they can use this free energy. Wiley Almond, told me how to do this a few years ago. When he was a kid in the depression, buying batteries to listen to his homebrew 2 tube regen radio was out of the question. So they used the long wire antenna they had scrounged from an old telegraph line to charge the batteries so they could listen to the radio.

correlates with the following observations?

http://www.electro-tech-online.com/gene ... g-emp.html

I had a long-wire antenna that was never struck and the house was never struck and we never lost any electronics to lightning. There was one time when I heard a periodic snapping and finally traced it to the BNC connector that I'd disconnected from the long-wire antenna. Even though an electrical storm was three or four miles away, that antenna was getting charged to over a thousand volts and then the BNC would arc over. I installed a neon lamp snubber on the antenna the next day.

Could not find the link anymore but somewhere on the internet I found this;

Stick an antenna up in the air, the higher the better, and wire it to one side of a capacitor, the other going to a good earth ground, and the potential difference will then charge the capacitor. Connect across the capacitor some sort of switching device so that it can be discharged at rhythmic intervals, and you have an oscillating electric output. T.H. Moray simply expanded on Tesla's idea to use high-voltage to create ionic oscillation.

[rjhuntington]

Thank you, MrAmsterdam. That last one has the key to power generation in the oscillating output. I'll bet with a suitable circuit you could generate AC from the sky.

[MrAmsterdam]

Hell Mr rjhuntington

Out of this post I compiled a new one ; Question for NASA and Esa engineers

http://thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpBB3/v ... 72&start=0

[jjohnson]

I'd bet that with a suitable RLC circuit you could construct a pulsar.
Jim

[MrAmsterdam]

...I dont see why not. Same phenomena, different scale...

[Osmosis]

A relaxation oscillator (Pulsar?) can be built with a source of electricity, a resistor, a capacitor and a plasma discharge lamp. A double layer should supply all you need. No reason to order anything from Allied Electronics.

[Ryujin]

Interesting, so is this what Tesla was tapping into? If so we just gotta figure out how to harness this fact and do so with out having a lighting bolt frying our butt and we can say goodbye to the power companies.

[mharratsc]

Don't forget about that NASA 'satellite tether' issue that they had... a variant of the same principle, I think?

[Nereid]

From the TPOD:

As a press release from the period states, the X-ray emissions are far too intense to be generated from hot gas in the cluster, so "shockwaves must be rippling through the gas." ESA astrophysicists, faced with such an anomaly, suggested that the shockwaves had "turned the galaxy into a giant particle accelerator."

The Science Daily article concludes:

Journal reference: 'Integral discovery of non-thermal hard X-ray emission from the Ophiuchus cluster' by D. Eckert, N. Produit, S. Paltani, A. Neronov and T. Courvoisier is to be published in a forthcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Here is the abstract of that paper, in the arXiv preprint server:

We present the results of deep observations of the Ophiuchus cluster of galaxies with INTEGRAL in the 3-80 keV band. We analyse 3 Ms of INTEGRAL data on the Ophiuchus cluster with the IBIS/ISGRI hard X-ray imager and the JEM-X X-ray monitor. In the X-ray band using JEM-X, we show that the source is extended, and that the morphology is compatible with the results found by previous missions. Above 20 keV, we show that the size of the source is slightly larger than the PSF of the instrument, and is consistent with the soft X-ray morphology found with JEM-X and ASCA. Thanks to the constraints on the temperature provided by JEM-X, we show that the spectrum of the cluster is not well fitted by a single-temperature thermal Bremsstrahlung model, and that another spectral component is needed to explain the high energy data. We detect the high energy tail with a higher detection significance (6.4 sigma) than the BeppoSAX claim (2 sigma). Because of the imaging capabilities of JEM-X and ISGRI, we are able to exclude the possibility that the excess emission comes from very hot regions or absorbed AGN, which proves that the excess emission is indeed of non-thermal origin. Using the available radio data together with the non-thermal hard X-ray flux, we estimate a magnetic field B ~ 0.1-0.2 mu G.

[The Great Dog]

Mr. Smith meant that a capacitor stores electric charge, of course, not electric current. He corrected his observation in this paper:

Dielectric Breakdown

A capacitor is used to accumulate and store electric charge. Capacitors are usually made of two conductors separated by an insulating medium, or dielectric insulator. An electric charge on one conductor attracts an opposite charge to the other conductor, resulting in an electric field between them that acts as an electrical energy reserve.

[flyingcloud]

I can"t help but stress the
contricution of the dielectric

[Nereid]

I can"t help but stress the
contricution of the dielectric

Yes, that's critical to capacitors.

And that points to what may be a weakness in the analogy Mr. Smith makes in this TPOD; namely, that there are no dielectrics in space plasmas (what separates double layers in plasmas is not a dielectric).

[davesmith_au]

I can"t help but stress the
contricution of the dielectric

Yes, that's critical to capacitors.

And that points to what may be a weakness in the analogy Mr. Smith makes in this TPOD; namely, that there are no dielectrics in space plasmas (what separates double layers in plasmas is not a dielectric).

Nereid would you care to expand on that please?

Cheers, Dave.

[solrey]

Nereid said:
And that points to what may be a weakness in the analogy Mr. Smith makes in this TPOD; namely, that there are no dielectrics in space plasmas (what separates double layers in plasmas is not a dielectric).

You mean something like a dielectric tensor?

Tensor describing the three-dimensional plasma response to three-dimensional electric fields; see (e.g.) Stix, Thomas Howard. _Waves in Plasmas_, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1992 for details.

Dielectric response of plasma in reversed field pinches near the ion cyclotron frequency (pdf)

In the present study we accurately calculate the dielectric properties of the plasma near the axis by considering particle orbits to first order in drift parameter.

Dielectric permittivity of a plasma in an external electric field

Dielectric permittivity is a fundamental characteristic of plasmas; in particular, it governs the screening of the electric charge in plasma.

Indeed, screening of electric charge in plasma is a property of a double layer.

cheers