Will drones convert lightning into energy in the future? (Symbol image, photo: Freepik, Arif Hakim NH)
Chiyoda – drones that are protected from flashing themselves because they are enveloped by a Faraday cage, according to the Japanese company Ntt corporation In the future, protect cities from lightning strikes and at the same time collect the energy that is made of them for earthly use. A corresponding drone has now passed a first test.
Lightning catch at a height of 300 meters
The experiments took place in a mountainous area near the city of Hamada in the Japanese Prefecture Shiman. The industrial organs used a device called Feldmühle that measures the electrical field strength. If this increased due to the approach of a storm, they started a drone with a Faraday cage. This increased to a height of 300 meters. It was connected to an electronics via a cable that processed the flash energy so that it could be used as an electrical current.
In fact, the electrically charged clouds could not resist the temptation to attack the drone, i.e. to fire a flash on it. Thanks to the cage, this could not penetrate the interior of the drone. He flowed into the cable, so to speak, over the shell and landed on earthly electronics.
98 percent of the lightning can be used
Shortly before the flash, the electrical voltage between the drone and the ground rose to more than 2,000 volts. The flash himself damaged the protective shield because of its heat, but so little that the drone continued to fly stably and finally landed safely. The lightweight cage can be installed on commercially available aircraft, it is said. It consists of electrically conductive wires that the flash cannot penetrate. The drone remains protected.
The NTT researchers have exposed the cage of artificial flashing, which had a current of 150,000 amps, five times more than natural flashes on average. However, there are outliers. However, the experts assure that the cage survives 98 percent of all atmospheric discharges without major damage.
Lightning contains noteworthy amounts of energy. On average, it is so much that it is enough for a six-month operation of a 60-watt bulb. Every year there are around 1.4 billion lightning strikes worldwide, which corresponds to around 380 terawatt hours purely mathematically. That is almost 1.5 percent of the global power consumption.
Source: www.pressetext.com
(PTE019/23.04.2025/11: 40)