On Northern Aurora As a Source of Ionic and Electrodynamic Energy for Northern Communities: Asking the Question.

Ampere Faraday and Benjamin Franklin walk into the north pole. What happens? Today JHMLabs begins a series of posts on NRC Challenge Program with an idea on the northern aurora as potential electrodynamic power source for northern communities. This would involve tapping in and interacting with the plasma currents just above the ionosphere. This requires further study on Langmuir sheath structure of Earth, i.e. directly understanding the formation of the ionosphere as directly caused by the polar Birkeland currents in the Earth-Sun circuit, and beyond…Is there a way to direct and interact with the huge ionic and electrodynamic currents that are beyond the double layer? Is it possible to capture lightning in a bottle?
aurora
nrc
Author

JHM

Published

February 6, 2024

(NRC Challenge Programs)[https://nrc.canada.ca/en/research-development/research-collaboration/programs/challenge-programs]

Our goal for 2024 is to reorienting our research towards NRC’s Twelve Challenge Problems. There are twelve challenge programs, and there’s alot of correlation between them all. But to begin, we select the few “physics” programs. They include:

We are surprised by how Arctic and Northern Development relates the most to Ampere, Gauss, Weber, and the electrodynamic program at JHM Labs.

Here is the question:

Penguins flying balloons capturing ions at high altitudes. If penguins could fly 2.0.

Is the Northern Arctic Rich in Electrodynamic Resources?

In a previous study of Gauss’ 1836 memoir and the world magnet model, we have realized that there is an important task remaining in Ampere’s electrodynamics, and this is the incorporation of Gauss’ observation that the aurora currents are the primary source and driver of the earth’s magnetic field.

What if the northern lights could be captured as natural resource like an electric water fall?

How do we harness wind energy with solid state materials and no moving parts?

We are inspired by R. Epstein’s Solid State Wind Energy Transformer (SWET) idea presented in (Epstein 2019). If the aurora atmosphere was naturally rich with ions and electrons, then it’s possible that SWETs would perform best(!) in the northern artic environment. In otherwords:

Is it possible the aurora are a source of ionic and electrodynamic energy in themselves?

It’s a challenging problem, because the energy is high above our heads in the ionosphere. And we are somewhat electrically isolated from it. This requires understanding the double layer formation and Langmuir sheaths of our planet. The existence of the ionosphere shows there is a current driving through the poles, and which is causing the double layer as a secondary effect. This leads to Thornhill-Talbot idea of earth’s plasma environment as a “leaky capacitor”.

For our applications we need to redirect the electric currents above the ionosphere, which is charge in motion, and somehow direct this energy and capture the energy into some potential wells.

There arises a secondary question of whether there is electric current from the sky to the in the northern regions? We presume that lightning strikes are extremely infrequent in the northern arctic. But precisely why?

Is it possible to fly high altitude balloons which electrodynamically capture free ions and direct that power to the ground?

What if the Northern communities were rich in ions driven by the wind, having energy available for capture by electrodynamic induction effects?

What if we could make lightening strikes as we wished, and could harness and convert that power into mechanical energy?

We can only begin with the questions.

Answers?

[To be continued –JHM]

References

Epstein, Richard I. 2019. “A Solid-State Wind-Energy Transformer.” Applied Physics Letters 115 (8).