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Re: BL saga

to: Malcolm

I've seen it form under the v shape in a large antenna guy wire.  It
appears to be an electrostatic effect as a large pile of leaves were
"sucked" into the base area of the antenna every time they formed.  No
leaves -- no balls.  It also occured BEFORE rainstorms not during them in
our experiences.  Some balls followed the guy wire and some detached. 
Average time around 45-60 seconds after ball formed and started moving.  On
rare occassion they would try to follow the nearby power line -- sometimes
for hundreds of feet.  No apologies necessary on your part -- I agree --
ball lightning is not really a "coil" effect at least as I have seen and
tried so far -- no luck.

DR.RESONANCE-at-next-wave-dot-net

----------
> From: Tesla List <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: Re: BL saga
> Date: Friday, September 25, 1998 5:36 PM
> 
> Original Poster: Jim Lux <jimlux-at-jpl.nasa.gov> 
> 
> Tesla List wrote:
> > 
> > Original Poster: "Malcolm Watts" <MALCOLM-at-directorate.wnp.ac.nz>
> > 
> > Hi all,
> >           I stuck some charred wood on top of my work coil last
> > evening and fired her up. Some bright spots did appear in the
> > streamers but you really had to look for them. It would be a bold
> > soul that could claim this was ball lightning. They appeared to be
> > burining particles of carbon ejected from the charcoal, probably by
> > the electric fields. The spots were formed in air streamers and I
> > suspect that the considerably brighter attached discharges would all
> > but mask the effect. They were not at all long lived and appeared
> > only in the streamers.
> > 
> > Malcolm
> 
> My gut feel is that ball lightning must include some aspect of a fuel
> being burned (or particles being incandescent), just because a plasma
> would cool too fast by radiation.  I'd talked to Jim Corum a year or so
> ago and he mentioned his tesla coil work with metal particles in an air
> stream and with sooty flames.
> 
> Subsequently, I've played around a bit with high energy sparks (several
> kJ) in metal particle clouds and through soot.  (Trying to build a
> visual simulacrum of the "death ray", don't you know...)
> 
> You get really striking effects from injecting soot (or small chemical
> dust particles of various kinds) into a free burning arc (like in a big
> jacobs ladder), including glowing blobs, etc. However, they aren't
> controllable.
> 
> One of the best ways to make a sooty flame is to burn a carbon rich fuel
> in a rich mixture. Acetylene in air makes such a sooty flame that it not
> only has copious black smoke, but little soot particles, which the arc
> ignites. Propylene also works, but not as well.  In the special effects
> business, a common technique to create black smoke that is moderately
> controllable is to burn a mixture of naphthalene and diesel oil (don't
> breath the fumes!!!!, particularly after extinguishing it and the
> naphthalene vapors are condensing in a very pretty cloud of crystals).
> You put it in a small metal container (like a sterno can?) that you can
> cover with a lid to extinguish it. Rubber cement also burns with a nice
> yellow sooty flame, that is tough to extinguish with blowing air. It is
> easy to ignite, too, because the solvent is hexane.
> 
> 
> Dr. Corum mentioned that they had built a quarter wave coaxial
> transmission line (two concentric) a few feet long fed from a moderate
> power RF amplifier which would generate a pretty steady plasma discharge
> at the hv points. I've always thought that you might be able to do
> somthing like feed your sooty mixture through the coax line in "puffs"
> to generate ring vortices which are made of incandescent soot.
> 
> Certainly, one can generate the ring vortices this way. I just don't
> know if the soot would entrain, and also be heated by the RF discharge.
>