Lightning Energy

Hello all! Today's post is about harnessing lightning energy for use in various  kinds of energy applications the world over. Can we do it? There are many people who have thought that one could both harness (capture) and harvest (take) energy from lightning for centuries. Look at Benjamin Franklin for example. In his famous key experiment, he tied a key to a kite and sent the kite up high in the sky into a thunderstorm. There, he watched as lightning did indeed hit the key. He thought he could conduct the experiment again and this time capture the lightning stroke he generated in a glass jar. Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried he could not store the lightning effectively. As we saw in the video last week, there are various ways in which we might be able to store the energy from a lightning stroke in fact, but one of them is not a glass jar. The advent of various kinds of electronics have brought us other electric storage methods such as capacitors and batteries. Storage methods such as these will fare better in storing lightning. But how about you? Can you discover the next best way to capture energy from lightning? How will you do it? How will you use the energy you capture? Think about it! That's all for now.

Lightning!

Greetings Science English students! I hope you're having a good week. This week's topic is an interesting and somewhat scary topic and one that everyone grows accustomed to from childhood - lightning. Lightning accompanies thunderstorms with strong winds. Lightning is basically a discharge of electricity, or a giant spark. Sparks like this happen within one cloud, from one cloud to the other, or from a cloud to the ground. Each lightning stroke heats the air to an amazing 30,000 degrees  C. The heat rush causes the air to expand in an explosion, and this explosion causes a shockwave that becomes a booming sound - one we call thunder. Thunder travels from the lightning source outwards in all directions. This is why we always see lightning and hear thunder together. Light travels fast and so we see lightning immediately, but sounds waves travel more slowly, and it takes longer for thunder to reach our ears. As a child, I remember my father telling me that you could determine how far away the thunderstorm is by counting right after we see lightning. Thunder sound travels 1 km in 3 seconds, so if we count 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi (the approximate time to count one second) then we know the lightning has traveled 1 km. If we can count up to 15 seconds, we know the thunderstorm is 3 km away. If the lightning stroke is very close to us, we hear a loud crack and then a loud bang. A rumbling sound indicates that a storm is farther away. What causes lightning? We really don't know. However, on condition for lightning to occur is that there must be separate regions containing opposite electrical charges. Let's learn more in the upcoming class! See you next time.