Managing Static Electricity In-flight

[[ Static.   I did not know that there is a static discharge line on all air ships.   I wonder what the fellow feels who grabs that first instead of the usual tether?   If we make an induction coil like what is used to charge some electric cars, could that be what we hang the static discharge line from?  Use a super capacitor?   And would we get much energy out of it?   Collecting and using static electricity is a hope of mine to recover some of the energy loss due to drag.  If it could be gathered continuously instead of just at landing it would be great.    And, of course, I mean if we have a lot of metal in our ship we should avoid thunder clouds completely.]]

   Sounds worthy of a whole new topic. The static charge is there, why not capture it?

   At present the prevailing wisdom, which could be wrong, as can any prevailing wisdom, is that static charge has too much volts and not enough current. Tell that to someone who just got struck by lightning 8-0

   We can make big capacitors the same way they made them in the old days; lay a strip of aluminum foil on a strip of wax paper and roll em up. That's how hard it is.

   Then, the cap can be discharged periodically trough a conditioning circuit into a lithium ion batt which will chemically hold a denser charge than a sheet of foil can hold.

Sounds good, Nav, I'll take two.  Now that we have this new thread, possibly someone versed in physics and electronics can make some suggestion.  I can do some research on Wikipedia and Youtube for static physics and see if there is some off the shelf toy that collects static charges that might be appropriate for an air ship.   I was thinking that the ship could be made more charge friendly, by making from two dis-similar plastics or perhaps the plastic and the foil is already a means of storing a huge charge.  Imagine a capacitor the size of a refrigerator, but instead of rolled up it is inflated to the blimp shape.   I'm on it.

wikipedia says about atmospheric electricity;

[[There is always free electricity in the air and in the clouds, which acts by induction on the earth and electromagnetic devices.^[2] Experiments have shown that there is always free electricity in the atmosphere, which is sometimes negative and sometimes positive, but most generally positive, and the intensity of this free electricity is greater in the middle of the day than at morning or night and is greater in winter than in summer. In fine weather, the potential increases with altitude at the rate, according to some writers, of about 30 volts per foot (100 V/m).^[3]]]

! that's alot of voltage. But it's only voltage in gas and needs to be rounded up like cattle on the wide open range.

   The trick is to attract electrons out of air and vapor molecules in large numbers. I can imagine using something like a car radiator, high surface area, light tinfoil honeycomb, forced-air flow. Maybe a wire hanging down a few hundred feet towards the earth would provide the negative potential for one side of the capacitor.
   Oh. Yep. The envelope would automatically be a candidate for including in the capacitor or attractor. The old ZMC dirigible would have been great for that.

  A conditioning circuit certainly would be interesting to see. If static could be constantly converted into energy for the motor, or stored until it built up to a usable level, that would be a big plus for long term airship flights. For short flights, we just need to safely discharge it and protect ground crews.
  I would imagine that the ground crews know not to grab the first line down until it has touched the ground first.
  A capacitor will absorb electricity until it is full, then it just doesn't absorb any more. Once a ship has the same potential as the air around it, it will not absorb any more. I guess if it had a higher charge, that charge would bleed off into the air somehow.
  Lightning can be cloud to cloud, cloud to ground, or ground to cloud, depending on the conditions. Airplanes in flight are usually safe because they are not in a path for a circuit. 

And  when  it does hit   them,    the charge  goes into  " skin  effect " and  exits  to  complete it path  to  ground .  Some  times  It  causes   problems  with on board  electronics   Some times  not .  Sometimes  they  get hit  and  the pilot  doesn't  even know it,  other  than  " that  was close "    Pretty  crazy .huh .
 I  think  there has been  a  couple of  instances  where  it  did  bring  them  down   however.

Yes, large air liners have exploaded in mid air due to "Positive Lightning" that is much more powerful than "Negative lightning" and they have discovered this only in the last ten years or so and have started upgrading electrical insulation.  It is hard to deflect a million volts.  Maybe Magnetic shielding would help direct it to a safe spot and away from electronics.

As for static, I have read the same things Nav did.  I also did some materials research and discovered that some materials give off an electron and become positively charged and some materials are inclined to draw an electron and become negatively charged.   This is similar to using two different metals to make a batter.   Well, Aluminum tends to give off an electron, PE plastic tends to draw an electron so we seem to have to potential to have a static battery, or capacitor if we line our PE with Aluminum foil.   I don't know if the glue to adhere it will act as an insulator, but it just might be that we could simply attach wires to the inside and the outside and hook that into  a circuit to collect it into a super capacitor.  

Or, if we ground it, we are giving off the charge through a wire, which can be coiled and run through a transformer to step down the voltage to a more compatible level and collect it from the transformer.   It is also possible that we can ground the top of the ship to a dissimilar material on the bottom, such as the skin of the Gondola via wires and use that to power high voltage Organic LED lighting known as "GLOW WIRE" .  Go to glow wire dot com.

A single burst of static does not carry much useful current due to it's short duration.  You would be lucky to get one turn out of a motor.   However ,  as Nav and Mike pointed out, if we could draw it continuously as it collects then we would have recovered some power that was lost due to drag and friction.   Like Solar energy, it is a stream that has to be stored up to be useful.   Once a capacitor is charged we can use it to top off our batteries and give them a boost.   Or a little extra power when dealing with winds while landing.   I would be happy if it would light up a Glow wire strip around the bottom of the ship.  LOL   Next, making super weapons from static electricity.

I rather doubt we'd need to glue tinfoil to the envelope to make a conducting layer.

There is aluminized  Mylar(R) plastic like they use in party balloons which we could use. Mylar is a complex PE film, technically called BOPET, (Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate) This film is stretched two directions, baked and often laminated with standard PE to add a soft but puncture resistand quality. so says wikipedia.

I just measured my very own "Happy Birthday" balloon and the silver-looking inside-coating measures a useful, conductive 10 ohms per inch. It can be one side of the capacitor. I don't know about the other side.

   It'd be worth the extra charge for alum. mylar envelope if we could suck electrons from the air and store them in a worthwhile usable number.

  The draeback to mylar is, although tough, it likes to rip once a hole is started.

Uppers!

Well, we only get air friction on the outside layer, the inside will have to get it's charge from induction.   I think the outside layer will induce a charge on the inside, perhaps an opposite charge to balance the charge on the whole, I am not sure.  But once you pull off electrons from the outside by grounding it to a capacitor, there will be a strong polar difference in charge and it will be like a battery.   I will have to study one of the static inducers, two plates , one of resin, the other of metal.   It could be that we could alternate from static electrical discharge to direct current and then back again in cycles.

  I think what we are discussing is called a 'plate capacitor',  maybe a 'leyden jar'. It would require a layer of aluminum, a dielectric layer of something, maybe the outer layer on the mylar, and the envelope layer. Proper construction would have to follow capacitor rules, no shorts between layers.
  Then we would have to research static electricity generation, to see if just flowing air across the envelope is enough. That would be so cool.
  Then we would have to figure out the 'conditioning circuit' to draw the charge into something to store it, so we can use it when needed.
  Wouldn't it be just too much if we developed some new power system? I don't think anybody has constricted a large plate capacitor to run off of wind power. No moving parts, I like it.
 

WOW !!

Yes, exactly for they would say, "Hell, boy, you would need thousands of square feet of thin sheet materials and where would you put the thing!?"   I don't think anyone has thought of applying a static accumulator to a blimp design.  But all I am really trying to do is recover lost energy from traveling or handling wind gusts.

What I have read so far is hard to wrap my head around, but the Electrophorus plate is  a metal such as aluminum, it is laid down on Resin, or wax or plastic that his been rubbed with rabbit fur and has a negative charge, this polarizes the metal plate and so you have a positive sticky charge on the bottom and a negative charge of excess electrons on the top which will jump off to your finger or a ground wire.   The metal plate can then be lifted to use as a positively charged source.  Once depleted the metal can be set back down on the plastic plate to be polarized again and again.

So, if an aluminum layer is glued to a negative generator such as PE but we cannot separate it we can continually collect  the charge from the aluminum side.   There are three main static generators, the Van de Graff, which is simple, the Whimshurst, counter rotating discs, not so simple and the Electrophorus plate, even simpler.  The materials most opposite from each other on the negative and positive materials list are TEFLON and Rabbit fur which is finer than cat fur and makes nice gloves.   These two make the best electric charging materials.   It isn't likely that we will be able to get much charge, but if we lend this project experiment to a university they may have some students who could come up with a circuit and materials list to use for the most current generated.   My spidey senses tell me there is a way to get both static charge and battery direct current from the same materials in reciprocation, one, then the other.

Static electricity can be modelled as a charge generator, and a simple electrical model can be used to understand many practical situations (Figure 1).

The generation of charge is represented by a current source I. In practice, depending on the processes, real industrial sources can generate currents well over a microamp. The capacitor C represents the charge storage properties of the system, and could be a material surface or a conducting object with a capacitance to earth. The resistance R represents charge dissipation processes (other than non-linear ESD) and can be up to 10¹⁴Ω in the case of good insulators.
It’s easy to see by Ohm’s law that if charge generation rate of even 1mA (1mC/s) is present, with a resistance of 10¹⁰Ω, a steady state voltage of 10kV would be produced! Fortunately many everyday sources generate charge below this level, and also do not do so on a steady current basis.

  Airplanes pick up lots of static, have 'wicks' to get rid of it. The trick here is to have an item of opposite polarity to absorb the static decay. As it is absorbed, more will build up on the envelope.
  I can't imagine what would happen if the ship approached a flagpole or something like that.    ZAP!

If the skin of the ship is polarized we might tap a current from it alternating from the inside to the outside, like an alternating battery, shunt it off with a rectifier diode to a normal battery, or circuit with the electrical junk on it and then to a battery or capacitor.  I think it is a little early to try something complicated.

You know the gravity lifters on Youtube.com call for very high voltage, I think around 30,000 volts through a very thin wire.   This is enough to lift the frame off the table.   It produced ionic wind which in turn pulls air through with it creating lift, or if sideways, creating propulsion.   (Make mental note: mike knows electronics...)   Where is the Omega symbol on MY computer keyboard?

  Inventors have been trying to make an ion drive for a long time. Airplanes and helicopters make a lot of static electricity, considered a hazard more than a resource. Probably too much trouble to tap it for use. Airships, on the other hand have this large surface area, and are looking to squeeze out every bit of power that can be found. It's surprising to think that the little ZMC 2 had eight hundred horsepower! Drag is a bitch.
  Tapping alternating static decay from the inside to the outside may be a good idea. An oscillator circuit might work. We don't have anything to create static charge on the inside, though.
   I'm just learning electronics, it's a very deep subject. I'm studying power supplies and joule thieves, cute little circuits that use dry cell batteries down to empty.
  The trick we need is to have a 'sink' or area of lower potential. Usually this is ground, but in the air we are not grounded. Losing the static charge to ground is not what we want. We don't want it to wick off to the air, either. If we can have the inside layer at a lower potential, we can bleed the charge to it through our circuit, drawing power hopefully. More airflow will recharge the static charge on the outside for another cycle, and once again it will be of a higher potential than the inside. Hopefully, maybe. This is where all the inventors get stuck, actually coming up with a workable design. The prop may make static, too. A lot of air going across that item, too.
  Google and Wiki say it can't be done, another fanciful impossibility. Then they say the charge decays, and there is a current there. We just have to get into that current.
  Agreed, this should be just a fanciful wish, not a distraction to serious airship building. I'm always keeping my eyes open to options, though.

You are right about having a "sink"  a well to collect current into, but that, by its very nature will quickly saturate and it will also have to be tapped by drawing the current off of it until we have a form we can store in a large capacity battery.   For instance, say part of the gondola is aluminum metal flashing, insulated from the ship except for a few wires run into a high voltage capacitor and then through a  transformer and diode circuits  which delivers say 240 volts into a series stack of small lithium batteries, like 3 volt button cells, 80 of them in series would be 240 volts, then use a switch to divide the voltage down into 40 volt sections at six times the amps.  Get what I mean?  A series to parrallel switch, I designed one for an electric car about 9 years ago and never built it, but it switches 6 batteries from series of 72 volts to parallel of 12 volts for easy recharging and to equalize the batteries with one another.  The switch allows power to even out in the cells and extend range   It would save on using another step transformer which consumes some of the power.  
.   We might need a higher potential material for a sink, Teflon has the greatest electron capture potential of any material on the list on on end, maybe it gives it up, yes, I think the rabbit fur on the opposite end of the spectrum collects electrons off of the Teflon.....so, a rabbit fur lined gondola, charged to 60,000 volts and a non stick skillet....never been considered for an electric circuit.?

  In this theoretical device, airflow across the outside skin is the static generator. The skin may be aluminum, or plastic. They are far enough apart on the list to serve our needs. When the charge peaks or saturates, a transistor switches a conductor to the sink. It would be nice if we could have something, a transformer or such, to convert that current flow into usable energy to charge a battery. It may take more than one hit to fill the sink. Now the sink is as saturated as it is going to get. We need another sink to drain that charge, that may be the same transformer. The current flow from the sink may go right back to the skin, before it has a chance to charge up.
  This system is like water sloshing back and forth in a bathtub, while it is simultaneously being filled and drained. The drain is our battery. The fill is the static charge created by airflow over the skin of the ship. The slosh is controlled by transistors. Throw in some rectifiers, diodes, etc., where needed.

wiki says;   [[ In fine weather, the potential increases with altitude at the rate, according to some writers, of about 30 volts per foot]]

That's square one. A vertical wire 100 feet long, hanging from the airship, can have, 3000 volts across the ends. Just a minute current because the end of a wire doesn't contact a large number of gas molecules.

Forgetting slipstream ionization, let's talk only about altitude-generated voltage for a minute.

 If the wire is connected to, say,  long tinfoil streamers at the bottom and to an aluminized mylar airship envelope at the top, with the aluminum on the outside, contacting billions of air molecules, we should now have significant current through the wire with thousands of DC volts across its ends.

DC is what charges batteries. Just tap into the wire at the point where its potential is say, 12 volts different from the end connected directly to the envelope and you'll have a voltage in the ballpark for charging your batt. Then insert a variable voltage divider in series with the wire to produce a voltage for applying to the battery terminals. That's basically all the circuitry that would be involved.

 The only question is how many charging amps can we manage to collect from thin air with these huge metal terminals of ours?  My Sears 8 hour car batt charger puts out 6 amps and we'd want to have at least that rate, I think.

Considering it takes kilowatts of energy to push a ship through the air it would be nice to get back 1/100 of that.   It would be a proof of concept and someone would soon come along and improve it.   I suppose we could test different materials as a sink, put a ground wire to it and measure the length of the spark.  I don't think that volt meters go up to 60,000 volts, nor are they good with mili amps.   Teflon sheets can be purchased on line.

Static electricity is not the same as generated electricity.