Lightning Energy: A Lab Scale System

Abstract

This chapter which has six subchapters explains the energy storage system in harvesting a lightning return stroke for a lab scale system. Nowadays, the world is facing the energy crisis and consequently a renewable energy is required as an energy contributor to solve the crisis. Hence, it is believed that lightning return stroke has a good future to be a free electricity sources. The main difficulty in harnessing the lightning stroke is to attract and simultaneously to store the energy, which limited in a microsecond. Due to that, the computer simulation works using PSpice is done as the preliminary effort intended for the hardware development as well as to understand and verify the proposed system. A lab scale system is set up based on natural characteristics of lightning to determine the performance of the sample capacitor as energy storage accurately. Hence, the single stroke impulse voltage is used as a mock of lightning. Regarding the energy storage device, the capacitor is employed due to the reliability, cost-effective and it is the most common. In addition, the direct tapping system and the high speed switching is most wanted in order to make the whole system more realistic. The capacitors are subjected to 1.2/50μs, 4,200V single-stroke impulse voltages generated by a single stage impulse generator. In this chapter, the energy of impulse voltage that successfully transferred and stored in the storage capacitors is discussed. Basically, the efficiency of the energy transfer is depends on the capacitance values and the switching times. As a final point, the lab scale system explained in this chapter demonstrates the capability to capture the energy from lightning return strokes that can be a clean energy sources. On the other side, lightning which have extremely high current and high voltage is a gratis electricity energy sources that can be replenished. The lab scales systems for harvesting the energy from lightning return stroke, which discussed in this chaper able to give a new contribution to solve the energy crisis and it will be very challenging. Up until now, the mature technology in harvesting the lightning stroke for the large-scale system is still not yet ready and the relevant scientific literature is not easily found. It noted that the final system proposed in this chapter would provide an understanding of the system principle and additionally provide a noteworthy contribution for further research.