SheerWind claims its INVELOX wind turbine produces 600% more power

SheerWind Inc. of Chaska, Minnesota is claiming in a press release that its newly developed funnel-based wind turbine system is capable of producing 600 percent more power than conventional wind turbines.

The new design uses funnels to channel wind to a ground-based turbine.

The idea behind the INVELOX system is to capture wind using wide mouthed funnels and channel it via ducts to a turbine sitting at ground level.

The wind picks up speed as it is concentrated through a series of nozzle and pipes before it is delivered to a turbine, which produces electricity.

SheerWind claims in its announcement that the system is capable of producing electricity with wind speeds as low as 1mph.

As an example, they say that tests have demonstrated that the system operating in natural wind speeds of 10mph is able to increase that speed to 40mph before it enters the turbine.

After passing through the turbine, the wind is exhausted back into the environment, in this case, at 15mph.

In another scenario the company says it tested the abilities of its system by comparing it with an identical turbine configured as a conventional system. They claim they found improvements of 81 to 660 percent.

The company says the unique design is scalable, making it suitable for use in both wind farm applications and smaller deployments and because of its smaller physical size, they claim the INVELOX is also more environmentally friendly—fewer are birds killed and there's less noise.

They also claim that installation capital is less than $750 per KW and that once up and running, the system costs just 1 cent per KWH—making it cost competitive with natural gas and hydroelectric plants.

They also note that the system can be put in place and run without government subsidies and still be profitable.

Amid the optimistic clamor there is one dark cloud—no one outside of SheerWind has been allowed to test the system.

For that reason, the claims made by the company are at this point, still just that. But, should the claims hold, the INVELOX could be a game changer.

Such a system could be purchased and put into use by virtually anyone wishing to produce their own electricity with the expectation of much higher production than conventional systems.

Chile quake produces tsunami alert in Pacific

BBC News - Map: Chile quake tsunami

The Chile earthquake caused a tsunami which surged across the Pacific, as the map below shows.

Moon produces its own water

The Moon is a big sponge that absorbs electrically charged particles given out by the Sun. These particles interact with the oxygen present in some dust grains on the lunar surface, producing water. This discovery, made by the ESA-ISRO instrument SARA onboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, confirms how water is likely being created on the lunar surface.

It also gives scientists an ingenious new way to take images of the Moon and any other airless body in the Solar System.

The lunar surface is a loose collection of irregular dust grains, known as regolith. Incoming particles should be trapped in the spaces between the grains and absorbed. When this happens to protons they are expected to interact with the oxygen in the lunar regolith to produce hydroxyl and water. The signature for these molecules was recently found and reported by Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument team.

The SARA results confirm that solar hydrogen nuclei are indeed being absorbed by the lunar regolith but also highlight a mystery: not every proton is absorbed. One out of every five rebounds into space. In the process, the proton joins with an electron to become an atom of hydrogen. “We didn’t expect to see this at all,” says Stas Barabash, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, who is the European Principal Investigator for the Sub-keV Atom Reflecting Analyzer (SARA) instrument, which made the discovery.

NASA: Centaur Moon Impact produces disappointing result

In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact.

But scientists remain puzzled and disappointed about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.

As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, the highly publicised NASA mission to search for water on the moon reached its grand finale at 0431 PDT (1131 GMT) with a pair of high-speed crashes into a lunar crater named Cabeus.

During the crucial moments at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, scientists and engineers with LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater grew larger on their screens.

Spectroscopic hints
Nearby, some 500 bleary-eyed visitors that had gathered overnight outside mission control were watching the same pictures on a giant outdoor screen.

Yet, immediately after the scheduled impact time, there was no obvious sign of the spectacular explosion that many were expecting. "Impacting into the moon is an unpredictable business at best," Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in a post-impact briefing.

Colaprete did not offer definitive word as to why the visual camera apparently did not detect the event but added there were interesting changes in spectroscopic data taken by the spacecraft that might have been produced by a debris cloud. "I'm not convinced that the ejecta is not in the data yet," he said.