Raindrops creating electricity?

[Commander Kinsey]

Raindrops creating electricity? But.... wouldn't you be better sticking a solar panel there? I assume you can't have both? Or could one fold up when not in use?

[Brian Gaff]

If that is what I think it is, its crackpot stuff. Now if you could harness the power in a thunderstorm that might be worthwhile. Brian

[alan_m]

Don't you just need a kite and a battery big enough to store the energy from the lightening strike? Power for life.

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Wed, 28 Jun 2023 10:09:41 +0100) it happened "Commander Kinsey" [e-mail] wrote in <op.168rqfunmvhs6z@ryzen>:

Raindrops falling on piezo transducers could work too? Or falling on a horizontally mounted dynamic speaker cone ?

I will take a closer look perhaps when their thing is in the shops here.

[Paul]

You can.

There's a whole book at the public library about this :-)

Even at a young age, I was suspicious of the contents of some of my library books. This particular book was a high quality print, with details on making fractional horsepower motors to run off an electrostatic field kite. There were colour plates of the finished electrostatic motors. But no plates showing the motors connected to a Wimhurst machine for test.

But I was not tempted in any way, to build anything I'd seen in that book. It all seemed like a very dangerous "crock". Even at a young age, Paul could "imagine himself being blown out of his socks" :-)

I have built one of those tiny corona engines (rotor with needles arranged tangentially with corona coming off the needles). But that wasn't using an electrostatic source, that was using a high voltage project to drive it (my 15kV flyback). the amusement of doing that, lasts for, oh, thirty seconds or so.

*******

If you do a Google, you can see topics like this are alive and well. The same silly experiments, only with a twist. The individual here, uses a drone instead of a kite! Eureka! I wonder what happens to a drone hit by lightning ?

*******

And yes, falling water can generate electrostatic energy.

Kelvin water dropper

I built one of these as a kid, and it really works. Where the criss-cross wires go to the collector rings, there is a thin arc discharge between the wires, about once a second. Holding an AM radio near the unit, the sound on the AM radio, helps the audience when they can't see the arc. The thinness of the arc, hints at the small number of joules involved.

The project details claim, you can scale the thing up, by using a garbage can as a collector, which means the farads of your "capacitor" are going up. Which is just a recipe for something nasty to happen (the arc is going to have a bit more "snap" to it).

Kelvin water droppers are self-defeating. As the voltage potential builds on the ring, the "beam" of water droplets no longer fall straight. The water can fall to the side of your collector bucket. And translated into English, this means there is a maximum voltage the cans can develop, before the generation process is upset. That's why you set up the unit, to discharge the cans at regular intervals (once every two second is good). Setting the spacing between the two crossing wires, sets the arc-over voltage point.

Mine was built with three 48oz juice cans. Two paraffin blocks (out of a 2.2kg box of paraffin blocks) serve as insulators under two of the cans. The third can is elevated above the collector rings, and is the water reservoir for the generator.

Paul

[Clive Arthur]

I once calculated the energy in an average (a very loose approximation) lightning strike as worth about £30. I guess it's more than doubled by now.

[micky]

I think that has been done. Isn't it where Dr. Frankenstein got the power to rejuvenate the body he assembled?

[John Larkin]

Put a plate on the roof and connect it to an audio amp and a speaker.

I did that as a kid and heard all sorts of weird stuff. I don't recall the sound of raindrop impacts, but they would be cool.

[John Larkin]

Earth averages a e-field above the surface of a couple hundred volts/meter. A kite with a bunch of needles can collect charge and deliver a small amount of power to the ground.

[micky]

Why is anything called Abstract so hard to read?

[Commander Kinsey]

Because the full version requires you to have a beard.

[Commander Kinsey]

You heard your neighbour? You created a parabolic dish? Or maybe aliens?

I used a motor as a speaker. You could actually hear the words if you put it to your ear.

[Commander Kinsey]

It's been done in both Back to the Future and Stargate Atlantis, so it must be possible.

[John Larkin]

No, it was just an e-field probe. Of course there was a lot of verying harmonics of 60 Hz, but lots of distant atmospherics, lightning and once in a while the "dawn chorus" of round-the-world lightning echoes and stuff. It was fun, but I was a weird kid.

[Vir Campestris]

That's probably true. The length of the life after you have captured a lightning bolt might be an issue ;)

Andy

[alan_m]

In the past 2 months here - 5 minutes of rain in one shower, one hour long thunderstorm and one day of light rain. And they complain that power from wind is intermittent :)

[Commander Kinsey]

As long as you have a kite with a very thick string. Or is the current low and brief enough not to melt it?

Also, you might boil the battery charging it abruptly.

I once had a 12V lead acid car battery in parallel with 30 others violently explode when it lost a cell and became a 10V battery, sucking a huge amount of current from the rest. I wasn't at home at the time, but came back to a very strong smell in the driveway and thought there was a dead animal somewhere. I later found a battery missing from the shelf in the garage, and found pieces scattered everywhere.

[Commander Kinsey]

You don't have to hold the kite. And people have survived strikes anyway, you just get a cool fractal tattoo.

[Commander Kinsey]

The best way to make power is PV solar panels and lead acid batteries. I can make power 10 times cheaper than I can buy it off the grid. And don't even think about not using batteries and selling it to the grid, they give you way less than they sell it for.

[Commander Kinsey]

The speaker cone could become a large microphone, and you could feed the data into a complex system for weather prediction. You would know immediately when it was raining, without the hassle of looking out the window.