Great Balls of Fire...:)

Posted by: M P 16 years ago

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Great Balls of Fire

Holy Cow...:)

I had a nice discussion with Kiril Chucanov in the last few days...:) As usual, from friction comes light...:)

The discussion wasn't a great sucess... I wasn't able to ascertain if Kiril Chucanov was onto something or just blowing smoke...

He places videos of Balls of Fire in microwave ovens..:) and claimed a 5MW Power Plant that creates energy from nothing.

I wanted him to say - "Well, I injected 100 Joules and derived 1000 Joules.. or I ran the power plant for 1 hour and extracted 18000 mega Joules... " This is the heat created in just one hour by a 5MW power plant..in fact, it can be even higher if the 5MW is an output power specification as opposed to just a simple measure of available power..

As you might now, to dissipate 18000 megaJoules is no small feat... I suppose the experimental setup is not linked to the power grid and that energy is extracted as heat only...This situation poses significant difficulty since one cannot dump legally large quantities of scalding water into the sink...

I would expect that a working power generator based upon such discovery would only be created after clear evidence of its validity, valid patents, etc.

Had he said that, I would take his word for it... That would be a meaningful statement... That amount of power would have to come out as heat and it would be trivial to measure the coolant temperature change during energy extraction...:) it would generate about 12 hundred liters or 260 gallons of boiling water per second...

Nobody would have any doubt about Free Energy if he had just said what I wrote above...

Any questions could only be laid on his credibility... not on experimental error.

Now we will never know...:)
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I followed up and found this in the New Scientist:

Lightning balls created in the lab -10 January 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition. Hazel Muir

The luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls persisted for up to 8 seconds, with smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning (Images: Gerson PaivaTools Ball lightning could soon lose its status as a mystery, now that a team in Brazil has cooked up a simple recipe for making similar eerie orbs of light in the lab, even getting them to bounce around for several seconds. Watch a movie of the bouncing balls here.

Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightning, a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms. It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes, sometimes hovering, even bouncing along the
ground. One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle, while in another report, a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than 20 times before vanishing.

One theory suggests that ball lightning is a highly ionised blob of plasma held together by its own magnetic fields, while an exotic explanation claims the cause is mini black holes created in the big bang.

A more down-to-earth theory, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, is that ball lightning forms when lightning strikes soil, turning any silica in the soil into pure silicon vapour. As the vapour cools, the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by
charges that gather on its surface, and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen.

To test this idea, a team led by Antônio Pavão and Gerson Paiva from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil took wafers of silicon just 350 micrometres thick, placed them between two electrodes and zapped them with currents of up to 140 amps. Then over a couple of seconds, they moved the electrodes slightly apart, creating an electrical arc that vaporised the silicon.

The arc spat out glowing fragments of silicon but also, sometimes, luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for up to 8 seconds. "The luminous balls seem to be alive," says Pavão. He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways, as well as smoke trails that formed spiral shapes, suggesting the balls were spinning. From their blue-white or orange-white colour, Pavão's team estimates that they have a temperature of roughly 2000 kelvin. The balls were able to melt plastic, and one even burned a hole in Paiva's jeans.

These are by far the longest-lived glowing balls ever made in the lab. Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls, but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves were switched off.

"The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that btained by microwaves," says Pavão, whose findings will appear in Physical Review etters. Abrahamson is thrilled. "It made my year when I heard about it," he says. The balls, although still small, lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of bserved natural ball lightning."

Pavão's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation, and experimenting with other materials that might work too, including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds.

It turned out that The Ball Lightning was just a Ball of Plasma...:)

Well, well, well... A very prosaic explanation for something that could revolutionize science...:) Nothing more than ionized hot matter... perhaps ionized Buckminster fullerenes....

There is a silver lining in this Balls of Fire debacle...

Let me propose a GEDANKEN Experiment...:)

Let it be a Bald Eagle (Steven Colbert's Stephen Jr. Bald Eagle) flying in atmospheric conditions where a lightning vaporizes the bird into a carbon rich plasma..>:)

This might look tragic, but for the people on the ground it is just another UFO sighting...;)

By the way, an airplane is naturally polarized, that is, friction should create a difference of potential which could interact with a Ball of Plasma and drag it along...:)

One just has to put two and two to find out that big balls of plasma created under conditions similar to the ones in my GEDANKEN experiment could be what people consider UFO, flying light balls... etc...

You heard here first...:) A Simple Explanation for UFO and the Creation of Balls of Plasma out of Bald Eagles...:)

Cheers,

PS- Paiva...Da proxima vez evite tentar colocar a Ball Ligthning in your pocket...:)

PS- The scientist explained the stability of the plasma ball by magnetic fields. This misses the point that a metal contains free electrons (conduction band). These free electrons are not unlike ionized plasma. From experiments t is clear that a hot (melting) metal is still electrically neutral, that is, the crazy electrons try to go away leaving a hole behind...:) They might try but they are attracted to the hole they left behind and returns. The same is expected to happen in a plasma ball. It should be even more true since the ionized particles have larger masses and lower scape velocities.

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