Electricity from Ground

An energy system that exploits the electrical potential difference between charged surfaces and induction

Prototype

by Bjorn Lampson — last modified2022-11-15T00:50:58+00:00

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The Core Problem

Any method that uses the circuit's own output to charge the plate has to clear one bar: the charging mechanism must cost less energy than the plate delivers. That's where most approaches fail.

Candidates Ranked by Likely Efficiency

1. Atmospheric collection (passive) — best ratio, zero input cost

Your existing Ascanius result (36VDC, <1mA) was passive — no energy input at all. The plate version of this just sits in the field and collects. The problem you already identified: it's throttled by ground quality and wasn't at resonance. With your well casing or ocean pilings as ground, this is worth revisiting before adding any active charging at all.

2. Corona discharge / ion wind from a sharp point

Run a small high-voltage supply to a needle point above or connected to the plate. The corona ionizes air and drives charge onto the plate. The key question is the ratio — corona is actually not terrible at charge deposition per watt compared to a beam. But you're still net-negative unless the plate is collecting more from the atmosphere than the corona costs.

3. Triboelectric or piezoelectric pre-charge

Mechanical charge generation (vibration, wind-driven friction) to prime the plate. Zero electrical input. Very low current but so is your load. Worth considering as a starter/primer rather than main source.

4. Thermionic emission (cathode ray)

Heated cathode emitting electrons onto the plate. Thermionics are reasonably efficient at actually moving electrons, but the heater power dominates. Almost certainly net-negative.

5. UV photoionization

UV light (even a small UV LED) aimed at a metal plate will eject photoelectrons — the photoelectric effect. The plate goes positive as it loses electrons, which is the wrong sign if you want to charge it negative. But — aimed at the ground electrode instead, it drives current in the right direction. Low power UV LEDs are cheap and efficient now. This is underexplored in amateur Tesla/Ascanius work.

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The Most Promising Self-Powering Path

Honestly — your best shot at self-sustaining isn't charging the plate harder, it's reducing what the circuit needs to sustain itself while maximising what the plate passively collects.

The loop I'd design:

1. Better ground (well casing or ocean piling) — this was your identified bottleneck

2. Plate sized and positioned for maximum capacitive coupling to the atmospheric layer

3. Resonance tuning — you never got there with the coil setup, and a plate aerial can still resonate if you add a series inductor

4. Tiny feedback tap — use a fraction of output to drive a corona needle that supplements collection during low-field periods

What voltage and current does your load actually need to sustain? That sets the bar we're designing to clear.

Bjorn: "start small, say a battery charger, with the eventual goal of useful power of say 1kw"

Good framing — start with something measurable and scale from there. Let me map the whole range honestly.

The Scaling Reality Check First

Your 36VDC / <1mA result = ~36 microwatts passively collected.

• A small battery charger (say 100mA at 12V) = 1.2 watts — that's ~33,000× your current collection
• 1kW = ~28 million× your current passive result

That's not a reason to stop — it means we need to understand which part of the system is the bottleneck before throwing active charging at it.

The Three Bottlenecks in Order

1. Ground impedance — your biggest identified problem. The well casing alone could move you orders of magnitude. Have you actually measured resistance between your current ground rod and the well casing? That number matters a lot.

2. Aerial capacitance / resonance — your coil was never tuned to resonance. A plate aerial has more surface area but purely capacitive coupling. A series inductor tuned to the natural atmospheric resonance frequencies (Schumann: 7.83Hz and harmonics) could dramatically increase current collection.

3. Collection area — at some point you just need more plate or more aerial wire. This scales roughly linearly with area.

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Staged Build Plan

Stage 1 — Honest Baseline (where you are now)

• Reconnect Ascanius circuit with well casing as ground
• Measure open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current
• This tells you what the atmosphere is actually offering at your site

Stage 2 — Tune to Resonance

• Add a variable series inductor to the plate/aerial
• Tune for maximum current into a resistive load
• Target: Schumann resonance or whatever your site's natural frequency is
• Expected gain: potentially 10-100× current if you hit resonance properly

Stage 3 — Active Supplementation

• Use a small fraction of collected power to drive a corona needle
• Sharp tungsten or stainless point, 1-2cm above the plate
• Feed it through a small step-up transformer from your storage cap
• This is your self-powering feedback loop — but only attempt it once Stage 2 is working, otherwise you're robbing a weak source

Stage 4 — Scale Ground and Aerial

• Ocean pilings as ground — this is potentially transformative
• Multiple plates in array
• At this stage you're likely in the milliwatt range and battery trickle charging is realistic

Stage 5 — 1kW

• Honest answer: this probably requires either a very large collection area or an active Tesla coil driving the aerial to establish a strong local potential — your salvaged 14,400V transformer and rotary spark gap become relevant here
• This crosses from passive collection into active atmospheric energy extraction — a different regime

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Immediate Next Question

What's your site situation right now — can you get a wire to the well casing easily? And do you have a meter that can read microamps?

That first honest baseline measurement with a good ground is the most valuable thing you can do before designing anything else.

Bjorn: "I have another concept that could relate to atmospheric electricity extraction and I want your opinion on whether is is useful in this context. imagine a 4" copper pipe with a plexi glass tube inside it maybe a quarter inch thick, and inside that an aluminum tube. at each end is a porcelain stepped plug that supports each of the tubes on a step and through a hole in the centre of the plug is a threaded rod which holds the end plugs in an is electrically connected to the aluminum inner tube. the whole assembly is heated to the point where the plexi melts while a high voltage is place across the metal tubes to create an electret so that the dialectric tube is polarized during its cool down period. could an array of these be usefull for extracting electricity from the environment?"

That's a genuinely interesting concept. Let me think through it carefully.

What You're Building

This is an electret capacitor — a permanently polarized dielectric (the plexiglass, or better, PTFE) sandwiched between two conductors (copper outer, aluminum inner), with the polarization frozen in during cool-down under high voltage. The threaded rod through the porcelain end plugs holds it all under compression and connects electrically to the inner aluminum tube.

The construction is elegant — the stepped porcelain plugs simultaneously support the tube concentrically, seal the assembly, and provide the electrical standoffs. That's good mechanical thinking.

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Does Polarization Actually Work This Way?

Yes, with caveats:

Plexiglass (PMMA) is a poor electret material — it takes a polarization but doesn't hold it well over time or temperature. It also has a relatively low dielectric strength (~20 kV/mm) and its glass transition temperature is only around 85–105°C — so "melt" is achievable but the working window is narrow

Better materials: PTFE (Teflon) is the gold standard for electrets — holds polarization for decades, higher dielectric strength (~60 kV/mm), stable to 260°C. PVDF is another excellent choice and is actually piezoelectric as well, which opens additional possibilities

The geometry works — a coaxial arrangement gives you a uniform radial electric field during polarization, which should produce a well-ordered electret

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The Core Question — How Does It Extract Energy?

This is where I want to think carefully with you, because there are actually two different mechanisms it could work by, and they're very different in usefulness:

Mechanism A — Static coupling to atmospheric field

The permanently polarized electret creates its own electric field extending beyond the copper outer tube. If the outer tube has gaps or is replaced with a mesh, that field interacts with the atmospheric potential gradient. Changes in the atmospheric field induce charge movement between the two conductors — extractable as current. This is real and measurable — electret microphones work exactly this way with sound-pressure changes.

Mechanism B — As a superior dielectric in your existing Ascanius circuit

Replace your standard capacitor with this electret capacitor. The pre-polarization means the capacitor has a built-in bias — it's not starting from neutral. This could improve rectification efficiency in the aerial circuit because the dielectric is already "leaning" in the direction you want charge to flow.

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My Honest Assessment for Your Context

Mechanism B is immediately practical — you're already building a multi-circuit Ascanius PCB. An electret capacitor with the right polarization direction used as the aerial capacitor (currently your 200nF/200V cap) could genuinely improve collection efficiency. The pre-bias reduces the voltage threshold the circuit needs to overcome before it starts accumulating charge.

Mechanism A is more ambitious — an array of these tubes with mesh outer conductors, oriented vertically to align with the atmospheric field, could act as a distributed capacitive antenna array. Each tube is essentially a sensor of the local field gradient. The question is whether the induced currents from field variations are large enough to be useful — at ground level the atmospheric field is ~100-150 V/m on a calm day, much stronger before a storm.

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What I'd Change in the Design

Swap plexiglass for PTFE tube — same machinability, far better electret performance

Make the outer conductor a copper mesh or perforated tube rather than solid pipe — lets the electret field extend into the surrounding air for Mechanism A

Polarization voltage — for PTFE at ~3mm wall thickness you want roughly 3–9kV across the gap during cool-down. Your 14,400V transformer could drive this through a voltage divider

Orientation — vertical axis with the field aligned radially outward matches the atmospheric field direction best

What's your instinct on which mechanism you were thinking of — atmospheric coupling, or as a smarter capacitor component inside the circuit?

Bjorn: "At first im considering using PTFE to make an eclectret capacitor instead of the glass sheet cap we were working on before (1.9nf)"

Good — that's Mechanism B, and it's a clean swap to think through.

The Existing Cap You're Replacing

From the Ascanius circuit work: your glass/oil-immersed plate capacitor, ~1.9nF. That's your aerial capacitor — the one sitting between the antenna and the diode bridge.

What the Electret Version Buys You

A standard capacitor is electrically neutral at rest — it needs the incoming atmospheric voltage to push charge across it before the diode bridge sees anything useful. An electret capacitor has a permanent internal polarization — it's already biased. That means:

The diode bridge starts conducting at a lower incoming voltage threshold

The effective sensitivity of the circuit shifts — you're adding a DC offset to what's essentially an AC-coupled input

In a weak-field day (low atmospheric gradient) the electret bias keeps the circuit active where a plain cap would sit idle

Matching the Capacitance

Your coaxial geometry gives you a capacitance of:

C = 2πεL / ln(r_outer/r_inner)

For a rough target — if your PTFE tube is say 4" outer pipe (inner radius ~47mm), 6mm PTFE wall, so inner aluminum tube outer radius ~41mm:

ε for PTFE = 2.1 × 8.85pF/m = 18.6 pF/m

ln(47/41) = ln(1.146) ≈ 0.136

C per metre ≈ 2π × 18.6pF/m / 0.136 ≈ 860 pF/m

So to hit ~1.9nF you'd need roughly 220mm of tube length — a very manageable size. About 9 inches of assembly.

What You Need to Nail Down Before Building

1. Exact tube dimensions — what PTFE tube stock can you actually source? The capacitance scales with length, so you can trim to target

2. Polarization voltage and duration — PTFE polarizes well at elevated temperature (150–200°C, well below its 260°C limit) under field. Your 14,400V transformer is overkill but workable through a divider — you want roughly 10–20 kV/mm across the PTFE wall during cool-down

3. Which conductor goes to aerial, which to ground — the polarization direction matters. The outer copper should go to ground (shielding) and the inner aluminum rod to the aerial input, or vice versa — but whichever way you polarize it, that has to match how you wire it into the circuit

Practical Build Sequence

1. Source PTFE tube stock in the right diameter range

2. Machine the porcelain end plugs (or substitute PTFE rod ends — easier to machine, same dielectric properties)

3. Assemble dry, verify concentricity

4. Apply polarization voltage at temperature, cool under field, remove voltage

5. Measure capacitance with a meter — compare to your 1.9nF target and trim length if needed

6. Drop it into one circuit on your test board as a direct swap for the glass cap

Do you have a source for PTFE tube stock, or is that the first thing to sort out?

Bjorn: would it make sense to make a flat ptfe electret cap in oil for the high voltage cap with the tesla coil?

Great question — let me think through this carefully because there are two very different jobs happening in a Tesla coil circuit, and the electret property affects them very differently.

The Two Capacitor Jobs

The tank capacitor (primary circuit) — this is the one that charges up from your 14,400V transformer, then dumps into the primary coil through the spark gap. It sees:

Very high voltage (thousands of volts)

Rapid, violent charge/discharge cycles at spark gap firing rate

Huge peak currents

The energy is meant to be released, not accumulated

The aerial capacitor (Ascanius circuit) — this is the 1.9nF cap we've been discussing replacing with the PTFE electret. It sees:

Low voltage, weak atmospheric field

Slow, gentle charge accumulation

The electret pre-bias helps because the circuit needs to accumulate charge over time

Why the Electret Property Doesn't Help in the Tank Cap

The electret's advantage is its permanent polarization bias — it lowers the threshold for charge accumulation in a weak-signal circuit. But the Tesla coil tank cap isn't accumulating a weak signal — it's being slammed with 14,400V repeatedly. The electret polarization is completely irrelevant at those field strengths; the applied voltage overwhelms the built-in bias by orders of magnitude.

Worse — those violent discharge cycles through a spark gap would likely destroy the electret polarization over time. Electrets are damaged by thermal cycling, mechanical shock, and strong opposing fields. A Tesla coil tank cap experiences all three.

Where PTFE Does Make Sense for the Tank Cap

PTFE is actually an excellent tank cap dielectric — just not for the electret reason. The reasons it's good:

Very high dielectric strength (~60 kV/mm) — good for high voltage

Very low dielectric loss (low tan δ) — critical for RF/pulsed circuits where lossy dielectrics heat up and fail

Chemically inert — won't degrade in oil

Handles the mechanical stress of repeated high-voltage pulses better than glass

A flat PTFE sheet cap in oil, without worrying about electret polarization, is a legitimate and well-proven Tesla coil capacitor design. The oil fills any voids, raises the effective breakdown voltage, and handles heat.

The Practical Answer

For the tank cap: PTFE flat plate in oil — yes, excellent choice, but build it as a plain high-voltage capacitor. Don't bother with electret polarization, it won't survive and won't help.

For the aerial cap: PTFE coaxial electret — yes, this is where the pre-bias actually matters and the operating conditions are gentle enough to preserve it.

Do you have PTFE sheet stock already, or is sourcing the starting point for both builds?