Well, here's a simple solution then. Just go re-purpose one of those cheap solar landscape lights. Remove the PV panel and replace the battery with the rectified 1.2V DC from your tower. Those solar lights have a boost circuit to drive the LED with just one cell at 1.2V.

My prediction is that it won't work. I don't think your tower will capture enough power to light your LED. It'll be fun to be proven wrong.

Another circuit you can try is the FLED (Google it). Unlike the solar light, the FLED is designed to slowly charge a capacitor and then quickly release the accumulated power into an LED or a small motor.

 

I have a difficult time learning new things due to a TBI in the military. So thanks for that remark. I'm not doing anything wrong just trying to learn something. Just forget about it, thank you to everyone who contributed something useful.

 

I thought there were rules against free energy on here.

 

That applies to over-unity and perpetual motion, not energy harvesting.

 

Wayne has suggested two ways that you might try to use the energy from your tower. Please abandon the idea of an amplifier. It does not use the energy from your tower, it uses the energy from a battery.

If you are serious you will try one or both of Wayne's excellent suggestions.

Bob

 

Hello,

I wonder how much energy can be harvested.
It is dependent on the distance to the source and energy of the source.

Bertus

PS TBI is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_brain_injury

 

to harvest your energy you need to store it up.

a water analogy is a really good one. the faucet in this case is your tower. it is collecting water and is ready to deliver it. the water has two properties that we measure. its pressure at the faucet, and its quantity coming out of the faucet.
You have pressure that is useable( 1 volt AC or DC). the problem is with quantity. I will be very generous and assume you are getting a tenth of a micro amp. So you have 1 volt of pressure and .1 microamp of current. power measurement multiplies these two numbers and calls it watts... your tower can at any given instant in time supply .1 microwatt to a circuit. an LED will need many thousands of times more power than the tower has to offer.

you can use circuits to re-arrange the volts or amps but when you multiply the numbers to get watts of power they are still the same. Actually a little less due to losses in the added circuits.

so you need thousands more towers to light a small LED, or you store the power in a battery or a capacitor for a length of time then run the LED from the stored power.

 

Actually a little less due to losses in the added circuits.

I fear the losses will be more than "a little", when compared to the tiny amount of power available. To have a better chance, the OP should find the capacitor type with the lowest possible leakage. I'm not sure the tower will overcome the capacitor leakage rate.

There are also integrated circuits specifically designed for "energy harvesting" from such diffuse sources. One of these would further improve the odds of finding some power.

 

I wonder how much energy can be harvested.

Me too. I looked a bit and didn't find much about the cosmic ray energy flux. Once I decided that company was a fraud, I sort of lost interest.

No doubt there is ionizing energy striking our planet. I've never heard it mentioned as having any significance in the whole global warming discussion, so I surmise it must be far less energy than sunlight. So put up a PV panel and move on!

 

and any "ion " energy would have very little to none ac component. the way a tether gathers power for satelites is completely different from anything to do with towers on earth. ions dont last long in the atmosphere, the reason that ion engines dont work in an atmosphere.

 

Of course the energy available from the "ion tower" might increase dramatically, by many orders of magnitude, in a thunderstorm. But I would not want to be around to harvest it.

Bob