Attach a lightning rod to your electric car, and fit it with a monstrous capacitor and step-down transformer.
Motive force for the vehicle is provided by a DC motor at each wheel, supplied by a trickle of charge from the storage device. It could even trickle feed a bank of the latest high efficiency batteries.
When you can't get lightning to strike your rod (all entendres intended) then you can simply rely on power from your local electrical grid supply.-- UnaBubba, Nov 14 2002 Half-baked http://web.archive..../egel/capcharg.html [angel, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004] Great Scott, Marty! We've got to get you back to 1985!-- pmillerchip, Nov 14 2002 Please tell me, Bubba, where are we going this time?-- PeterSilly, Nov 14 2002 Green.-- UnaBubba, Nov 14 2002 I'm envisioning a trolley pole used by electric buses or trains to receive power from overhead lines, but this pole would be really long to feed current directly from the clouds.-- FarmerJohn, Nov 14 2002 Just try to get third party, fire and theft insurance on this thing ......-- 8th of 7, Nov 14 2002 Didn't Andrea Deicke teach you anything?-- st3f, Nov 14 2002 [st3f], I've just now read the Andrea experiment -- and it may be best if [UB] were to avoid electricity where possible.-- Amos Kito, Nov 14 2002 St Threef, that was where the blinding flash of inspiration came from, in the first place... I guess. Made all the worse for it being so horribly, painfully true.
Thank you, I now have tears of mirth making it impossible to see what I am typing.
[Alpha], Perhaps, except that most electric car designs are not often configured to utilise direct lightning strikes as fuel. How to attract lightning? Drive around on mountaintops during electrical storms.-- UnaBubba, Nov 14 2002 //Drive around on mountaintops during electrical storms.//
...cursing every deity you can name.-- whimsickle, Nov 14 2002 I was thinking more of a series of say 400 units at around 10,000 Farads apiece. Some of the latest electrochemical capacitors are very high efficiency.
I specified capacitors only because I couldn't see any other way to get a lightning strike into batteries without a very large explosion occurring. Of course, maybe that's the point of the whole exercise <g>.
This *is* the halfbakery, remember?-- UnaBubba, Nov 14 2002 You're not kidding about the volume of a lightning strike/thunderclap at such a close distance, I wasn't even wearing a hearing aid... 1 foot from a window I slept 7 feet from that window lightning did strike a birch tree 7 feet in the air I leapt though the skin was whitening I didn't go pee-- thumbwax, Nov 14 2002 My god man!!! get a grip!! Think about this, if lightning is able to travle many hundreds of feet to the ground, whay exactly do you think it would do to a capasitor. Well, if you want to blow up a 10,000frd Cap. (if they make them that big) I dont sugest you sit in the drivers seat. I have seen the holes lightning can leave in an unsuspecting airplane, its just not something you want to toy with. Kids please dont try this at home!-- Chaos_5, Nov 15 2002 Got any photos of a *suspecting* airplane?-- UnaBubba, Nov 15 2002 Get a horse and buggy. Attach a generator at each axle. Try to make the buggy really long, so that you can put more axles and more generators on it. Go for a ride about once a week and power up your batteries to use for your home.-- sasquatch_4, Nov 16 2002 // I've had lightning strike a tree less than 5 feet from where I was standing.. You don't want to listen to that everywhere you drive. 8th, even you would have been impressed by the sheer volume of a thunderclap from 5 feet. thcgenius //
So it would be a reasonable to add a "bio-mass to methane conversion plant" to process you shitting yourself each time you caught a lightning bolt.
P.S. Which of these thc's do you prefer - Delta-8 or Delta-9?-- Le Champ, Nov 17 2002 I'm wondering... Having charged large capacitors personally, I'm aware that a resistive load needs to be applied across the poles in order to prevent the capacitor from "sucking up the power" too quickly and causing the capacitor to explode. What amount of resistance would be necessary across the poles of a 10,000 farad capacitor, assuming that one exists, in order to charge it in, let's say, a few microseconds, without it blowing up the whole damned village?-- X2Entendre, Nov 17 2002 // UB: What constitutes a "monstrous" capacitor? thcgenius //
When I did my B.Eng degree we assessed an electrolytic 10 Farad capacitor operating at 440V DC would be bigger than a long-wheel-base Land Rover. Hmmm.. think I'll start a new trailer business...-- Le Champ, Nov 17 2002 Interesting point x2Entendre. First we need to know the inductance of the circuit. It would also be sensible to arrange a bank of capacitors in parallel to "sink" the energy more effectively. Also building in a failure margin to the quantity used (it would be likely that a few would explode on each strike).-- Le Champ, Nov 17 2002 When lightning bolts strike a beach the make a 10 foot funnel of glass in the sand. What kind of insulation would you use that has a greater melting point than glass?-- jvanzand, Jun 16 2003 I personaly wouldnt want a 10k farad cap charging up within 1 mile of me, not to mention the thought of lightning strike the charging method. Allthough you could probably put 500,000 miles on it and never get the lightning to strike it anyways.-- bxbase, Jul 11 2003 Where exactly do the ten thousand foreign bicycles come into it ?
Maybe I've read this wrong.-- squeak, Jul 11 2003 Speaking of capacitors, my physics professor brought in a 3F cap that was about half the size of a cellphone battery.
I was impressed.
My guess is that it was microfabricated using something like vapor deposition of alternating layers of conductors and insulators, and that the insulating layers are so thin than anything above a few volts would exceed the breakdown voltage.
But I could also be completely mistaken. I might be able to ground the thing, touch the other end to a VanDeGraff generator for a few minutes, and walk away with a couple kilojoules in my pocket.
That, by the way, is what she said.-- TerranFury, Jan 26 2004 halfbakery