Can static electricity ever be exploited?

Or is that rather like the fountail of youth or the transmutation of lead into gold; unobtainable?

:)

aside from that it has little use as an energy source.

Those carpet shocks are sometimes worse than a slap in the face!

attached to them?

Therefore, not too practical to make useful Watts of power.

Lightning is a static charge - and it can supply an ampere or two - or actually 10,000 - 100,000 amps, at hundreds of millions of volts. Yikes!

I'm not an expert in this particular subject - but I think that if we could produce superconducting material capable of supporting high current densities, the natural charges in the air (that cause lightning when they become sufficient) could be harnessed to provide electrical power. (It's a bit complicated - but possible, I think).

But I guess you're right, it does have an electro-static source.

And you yourself named the biggest problem - dealing with the absurdly high current of a lightning strike. And lightning's propensity of finding the lowest resistance path to ground, which might not always coincide with where you want it to go.

Still, I guess it's possible.

Another theory that was put forth was to have a cable attached to a satellite orbiting the earth in a geosynchronous orbit. The cable would act as a permanent lightning rod/static generator.

I don't know if that would be workable either.

is what makes photocopying work.

Last year I did a paper for an English class on Chester Carlson who invented the process, and found it absolutely fascinating. I still don't fully understand it, but essentially static electricity is used to make the grains of toner cling to the places that will then be printed. It's a totally unique process. Carlson was not merely the first but apparently the only one who ever thought of this idea, and without him, without photocopying, modern offices would be vastly different from what they are now.

Who here remembers carbon copies? I do.

It was the first thing I did when a carbon copy was passed to me in class - hot off the presses, as it were.

The paper was damp..and to the nose it went.

It was better than eating paste...

Ozone is always produced in high voltage electrostatic processes in air.

That's why you should never have a laser printer in a small room with no ventilation.

of dittos, which used an alcohol based solvent to make the copies.

Carbon copies used carbon paper, and the very most you could get was ten copies at a time, although the last two would be nearly unreadable.

Sounds good on paper, but it doesn't translate to reality.

The engine nor the philosophy.

Oleg Jefimenko wrote at least one hobbyist-oriented book on building electrostatic motors, called, appropriately enough, Electrostatic Motors. It is out of print, but Amazon still has a reference to it:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0917406028/sciencehobbyist/

The Science Hobbyist in the URL is Bill Beaty, an electronics engineer with a fairly popular website at http://amasci.com/ Beaty has some truly weird-but-real DIY scientific stuff on his website. My favorite is the page on hand-drawn holograms. He has a page with references on electrostatics; he also cites Jefimenko's book (http://amasci.com/emotor/vdgbook.html).

I never personally built an electrostatic motor (when I was interested in it, I didn't have access to the tools to work Plexiglas, the medium Jefimenko's plans use), but they do actually work. They are fairly popular projects for young and feisty EEs and just-plain-old electronics hobbyists. I'm sure there's a few video files of such motors in action on the Internets.

The devil, as usual, is in the mundane details. The problem with using atmospheric electrostatic energy for doing usable work is that it is not too efficient, although that might "just be an engineering problem" right now.

--p!