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Comment by shiroiuma | Hacker News Reader

>- no significant skin effect at 400Hz -> use speaker wire, lol.

What are you talking about? There's a very significant skin effect at 400Hz. Skin effect goes up with frequency. These datacenters use copper busbars, not cable, so skin effect is an important consideration.

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At 100 000 A for a 100 MW data center at 1000 V, speaker wire is a joke.

You obviously need at least a dozen stands in parallel!!

Clearly skin effect scales with frequency but, 400 Hz is still low, only 2.5x lines frequency (the scale is by the root); so the skin depth is 3mm. 3mm on each side makes for a pretty hefty rectangular cross-section.

If you could get that 100,000Amps flowing through your speaker wire, the vaporised copper and the plasma channel would probably keep your 100MW flowing, at least until your building caught fire.

Even your monster cable? ;)

Well, it'd still vaporise, but it'd sound smoother and more musical as it did it, and the soundstage from the plasma arc would be _stunning!_

It's almost worth the experiment and your cables are a sacrifice I'm willing to make. For science, of course.

You're _so_ right!

I'm pretty sure you have my delivery address from when I bought sorted Lego from you about 10 years back.

Let me know when to expect the 100,000Amp test equipment!

I shall make sure I wear better PPE than just my reading glasses.

:-)

This would be the funniest thing to do. 100K Amps is doable, the question is for how long. That would be one very impressive bank of capacitors. And to turn a 00 into plasma would have some spectacular side effects, such as raining molten copper across a sizeable area. Just your reading glasses would indeed not be enough, there probably isn't any PPE that I would consider entirely safe other than sufficient distance from ground zero. But now I'm really curious. I have a spot welder that will do bursts of 5KA and that will happily throw the breaker every so many welds. 100KA sustained will be a fair engineering challenge.

Ah, that lego project... that was one I always wondered if I should have industrialized it but sourcing enough lego was a real problem.

Ho ho ho, you asked for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC7sNfNuTNU

See also (as posted elsethread): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoGbrgOhPes

Holy crap. That's a whole series of bad ideas extremely well executed. That guy probably has never seen what a lead acid battery can do when it explodes. He keeps hiding away from the hot metal but in the path of ~half of those batteries. Ignorance is bliss.

That's low voltage lightning :)

He was gifted an arch flash suit by the guys from Lightening on Demand :D

"The gift of life". Complete madness.

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