Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I looked up a few facts about plasma and none have answered my questions without getting side-tracked. Can plasma from any gas recharge its own battery source?
Following up on that question, will the plasma eventually die out and no longer work, or could it be a source of energy that could be sustainable for large amounts of time?

I'm sorry but I don't understand your question.

You asked, "Can plasma from any gas recharge its own battery source?"

I don't understand in what way you are connecting plasmas and batteries. A plasma is a heated, charged form of gas. You could use batteries as an energy source to create a plasma, but I know of no way to recharge a battery using plasma.

What I was asking is if you could use plasma as a conductor in order to return the electric flow back to the heat source (in this case a battery) and continue the flow to create a battery that lasts a long time to power the constant visual effects of the plasma. In this case I am going to compare this to the plasma "ball" that can be sold at, lets say Wal-Mart.

Say you bought said plasma ball, cut a hole in top of the glass casing, and inserted your positive and negative nodes through an air-tight rubber plug keeping the selected gas inside. Then connect the nodes to some copper wire and re-attach them into the positive and negative sides of the battery, closing the circuit.

With the Circuit completed, and with my basic knowledge in this "4th" state of matter, I am aware of the fact that plasma conducts electricity and will create this circuit without a doubt. But what i am unaware of is how long that plasma will stay in that state before burning out. Due to my tight Budget and lack of know-how, i cannot follow through on my idea.

I am also unaware if the Plasma will ever burnout.

You have asked some questions about a plasma state of some gas without providing all of the information needed to answer your questions.

The fundamental question that needs investigated is: Is there a chemical reaction occuring in the plasma or does the inital chemical state and the final chemical state match with the only transient changes being electron state changes?

High energy plasma states of inert gasses (ones that do not undergo chemical reactions) are ones where electron energy states are raised so that they form an electron cloud that surronds multiple atoms so that the electrons are shared between multiple atoms. In this state, large amounts of electrons can flow from an external electron source to an external electron sink. This happens during a thunderstorm for lightning events and plasmas are formed that do not involve inert gasses so chemical reactions occur along the plasma path in the atmosphere. Look up ozone production by lighning for one example. Even when the primary plasma involves inert gasses, there maybe other molecules involved as a catalyst (again no difference in starting and ending states) or as a minor participant (in which case a chemical reaction occurs). If a minor participant chemical reaction occurs, there are further questions as to whether the ending state result changes the required energy level to start and maintain another plasma event of the primary participant. If the primary participant is not an inert gas, then you need to figure out if the starting and ending chemical states are identical. This maybe VERY difficult to prove as there maybe a consistent few parts per million chemical reaction that slowly changes the chemical balance that is beyond your ability to measure the difference quickly so it may take years of run time to answer the question.

A different tac on this answer:

The way your questions reads, it seems if you are asking whether the plasama could be used as an energy source to recharge the batteries that were used as the energy source to create the plasma in the first place. In the absence of additional energy from some other outside source, the answer is an absolute no. That comes under the heading of a perpetual motion machine, and they are impossible. Such machines keep showing up and promoted by confidence criminals as the latest energy source, and they continue to be shown as frauds.

im sorry if my question wasn't very clear, what i am asking is whether or not the battery creating the energy source of the plasma can be linked from the area that contains the plasma (the plasma acting as a conductor), and linked back to the original battery source thus creating a constant flow of electrons in this continuous loop.

Is anything losing energy?
Is anything deteriorating?

Givin the fact that there are no devices leeching off of the power source, would this be a continuously powered plasma ball that will never run out of energy?

Have you done some basic research into how batteries work?

When a battery is discharging (powering a device), positive ions (such as Li+) flow through the electrolyte inside the battery from one electrode (end of the battery) to the other. Electrons cannot move through the electrolyte, so the only way they can get from one electrode to the other is to flow through an external circuit. While electrons are flowing through this external circuit, they can be made to do some work such as lighting a bulb, playing a radio, or ionizing gas molecules into a plasma -- all of these tasks consume energy.

When the battery is completely discharged, that means that all the electrons and positive ions have moved into their lowest-energy states, and even if you complete the circuit by connecting a device to both electrodes, no electrons will move through the circuit. The exception is when a rechargeable battery is connected to a charger. A charger moves electrons and positive ions back to their original, higher-energy locations; at the same time it must consume energy itself by being plugged into an outlet. Charging a battery is not a matter of putting electrons into it -- there are always about the same number -- it's about moving them into higher-energy states.

The key point here is that the plasma generator is not really different from any other device that's plugged into a battery or other source of power. Any device provides a path through which electrons flow and consumes the battery's energy. There is never actually a continuous loop of electrons since inside the battery, only positive ions move. When plasma is created, it changes chemical potential energy (the kind of energy a charged battery has) into light and heat and possibly some chemical reactions, as Craig explained. It could be possible to recover some of this energy with photovoltaic and thermoelectric devices, but those processes are never 100% efficient -- some energy would be lost.

For a plasma to act as a battery charger, it would have to move electrons 'uphill' to a higher-energy state, which means that the plasma would have to be created by a source other than the battery itself. Lightning is one example, though I can't think of a related experiment that isn't dangerous.

Amanda

You would be losing energy off of the plasma ball in the form of radiation.