Charge-Dipole Acceleration of Polar Gas Molecules towards Charged Nanoparticles: Involvement in Powerful Charge-Induced Catalysis of Heterophase Chemical Reactions and Ball Lightning Phenomenon
Figure 1
electrostatic fields and the high initial concentration of aggregated aerosol nanoparticles-nanobatteries facilitate electrostatic aggregation of individual nanobatteries and automatic conversion of these composite aerosol aggregates to microscopic nanoparticle-based high-voltage generators. Ball lightning can contain some hundreds of billions of individual nanobatteries per cubic centimetre. Every such individual nanobattery is an electric dipole and every short-circuited individual nanobattery is also a magnetic dipole. If the initial concentration of the aerosol nanobatteries is high enough, these nanobatteries can spontaneously form metastable micrometre-sized aerosol chains aggregates due to the mutual electrostatic dipole-dipole attraction. However, an external electrostatic field, for example a thunderstorm electrostatic field, can modify this self-assembling process. The electrostatic aggregation of the nanobatteries enables the periodic formation of relatively long electric circuits consisting of many nanobatteries temporarily connected in series. The micrometre-sized chain aggregates, which contain only ten thousand individual particles-nanobatteries, can locally generate a ten kilovolt voltage with corresponding macroscopic spark discharges. In particular, the aggregated composite aerosol nanobatteries can be spontaneously formed from soot aerosol nanoparticles-nanoanodes and metal oxide oxidant nanoparticles-nanocathodes. Unipolar charged aggregated aerosol nanobatteries consisting, for example, of the soot carbon-reductant nanoparticles and CuO oxidant nanoparticles (or also of the soot carbon reductant nanoparticles and Ag2O or PdO oxidant nanoparticles) could be one of the most probable components of lightning balls frequently generated from electrical equipment during thunderstorms.
