Utilizing Lightning Energy

Watch the demo of how lightning energy can be stored and utilized to power an LED light on my Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/profhuang) or click on the video below.




Chris Alright (a former student of mine) and I designed a model in 2006 that demonstrated the utilization of lightning energy from atmospheric lightning discharges. The equipment consists of an electrostatic charge generator and a metal house on a piece of pilewood. Inside the model house, there is a simple RC circuit with an LED indicator and a switch. The essential ideas of this model are that we can use a capacitor to store charge collected from air discharges and the charge can be used to power an LED when enough charge has been collected.

Chris had moved on to University Park when we videotaped the demonstration. I asked my teaching assistants (Pietro Iadevaia and Robert Thacker-Dey) to help me to do the demonstration. Our Digital Commons specialist videotaped and edited the film for us.

Chris Alright took physics with me in 2006 and asked to do an Honors project for the “Electricity and Magnetism” course. Since I just got into the field of lightning research, I thought it would be great if his project had something to do with lightning. We discussed what his project would be – something to do with lightning discharges. Initially, I wanted to use a magnetic field sensor in the physics lab to measure the change in the magnetic field during lightning discharge. The Van Der Graaf generator would be used to produce electrostatic charge that would discharge through air. It was to simulate lightning discharge, and the magnetic field sensor would be used to measure the magnetic field. It did not work. The laptop that the sensor was connected to froze every single time when the lightning discharge occurred. After two weeks of trials, we gave up. It was obvious that we needed to come up with a different project. So I sent him to do some research to find projects that would be feasible.

He came back with an idea of building a Faraday Cage to demonstrate how it could protect a house. I told him it was a great idea, but how about doing a little bit extra? How about building something that could use the lightning energy when the Faraday Cage is not used? So we discussed how we could accomplish that. I told him what I thought would be required for the project. We needed a model house that is conductive, a device that can store the charge collected, and an optical device that uses the stored energy from lightning discharge. After discussions, we decided that a model house made of aluminum, a capacitor to store the charge, a couple of resistors, and an LED indicator would be required. He came back after a few weeks with the model house and a Faraday cage made of copper wires. That is a great thing to have a bright student to work for you. You tell them what you want, give them stuff, and they come back with a finished product. That is simply fantastic.

When I asked him to construct the model house, I had no idea if it would work, that is, if it would be possible to collect charges from the discharges and store them on a capacitor. If you searched for topics on utilizing lightning energy, you would find quite a few articles that say it is not practical to utilize lightning energy. Perhaps that is true, but I think I wanted to show that lightning energy can be utilized if we want to. During the demonstration, we turned the Van Der Graff generator on. When the charge on the generator was large enough, it would discharge through air. The metal house was positioned to be near the generator. After a couple of minutes of discharge, we would have collected enough charge to power the LED. It was quite exciting to see the LED light lit up when we pressed the button of the switch. We proved it that lightning energy can be stored and utilized. Of course the laboratory lightning discharge is very much smaller than the lightning discharge in nature. Image if we had the device to harvest the lightning energy from nature! Anyway, the important concept of this demo is that it can be done.