Hello Sir,

I came across a vague idea of the possibility.

A little background :There are three primary types of lightning; from a cloud to itself (intra-cloud or IC); from one cloud to another cloud (CC) and between a cloud and the ground (CG).

At this point, we are comfortable and researches are going on (as far as I know ) only with the CD lightnings

In general, cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes account for only 25% of all total lightning flashes worldwide. In the tropics, where the freezing level is generally higher in the atmosphere, only 10% of lightning flashes are CG. At the latitude of Norway (around 60 North latitude), where the freezing elevation is lower, 50% of lightning is CG.

The issues involved the process:

1) Thunder storms are sporadic and lighting strikes random

2) The energy in dc has to be stored and converted to an alternating current, without blowing out the collection system in a single large strike.

3) The energy contained in a lightning bolt disperses as it travels down to Earth, so a tower would only capture a small fraction of the bolt's potential.

4) Lightning has a high voltage but not a huge amount of current. Controlled sources of electrical energy typically want the other way around -- lots of current at lower voltages.

Natural Process of Lightning:

In order for an electrostatic discharge to occur,

1) a sufficiently high electric potential between two regions of space must exist

2) a high-resistance medium must obstruct the free, unimpeded equalization of the opposite charges.

Addressing the issues:

Challenge 1) Random Nature:

One direction to take this would be in the way of lightning propagation. Using super conductive fluid expelled from the exhaust of a 2 foot rocket in the proper conditions, and one could induce a strike in a very controlled, accurate way. Launch it off a tower like done inhttp://www.lightning.ece.ufl.edu/and one could potentially develop ground infrastructure to establish a "lightning farm" for harvesting power.

Challenge 2) Conversion:As far as converting the strike into power that is easy and can be done with existing technology(?). Direct the strike into a container of noble gases. Power then excites the noble gases into a rapidly expanding plasma. Increased pressure from expansion can be coupled to do mechanical work, e.g. a piston. (May be a Papp engine, although it was a failure when it was initially patented)

Challenge 3) Establishing the electric field in CG lightning

As a thundercloud moves over the surface of the Earth, an equal electric charge, but of opposite polarity, is induced on the Earth's surface underneath the cloud. The induced positive surface charge, when measured against a fixed point, will be small as the thundercloud approaches, increasing as the center of the storm arrives and dropping as the thundercloud passes. The referential value of the induced surface charge could be roughly represented as a bell curve (Gaussian!!!! once we get to Gaussian, we can apply a lot of signal processing techniques to quantify).

Challenge 4 ) Rate of capture :

The oppositely charged regions create an electric field within the air between them. This electric field varies in relation to the strength of the surface charge on the base of the thundercloud the greater the accumulated charge, the higher the electrical field.

The electrical current within a typical negative CG lightning discharge rises very quickly to its peak value in 110 microseconds, then decays more slowly over 50200 microseconds.

May be some optimization techniques can be applied to reduce the time in which we can capture the energy ( if we can :) )

Lot of research going on in this area :)