The new AVX400 turbine, which will be released publicly in the fall of 2006, embodies a number of breakthroughs that greatly improve the viability of wind on some urban and suburban buildings. Among the technical improvements, the blades of the turbines were designed to operate at relatively low speeds, which dramatically reduces noise and vibration from the turbines—a major deterrent to placing turbines on buildings. More significant, however, is AeroVironment’s discovery that on wide buildings, even if they are not especially tall, the wind intensifies as it crests the building’s façade and moves over the roof. “If you go to the edge and look over, you get this rush of wind,” notes Paul Glenney, AeroVironment’s director of energy initiatives. In the field, AeroVironment has measured a 40% boost in wind speed, which translates into about 2.7 times as much energy in the wind.

While developing these technical advances, AeroVironment didn’t neglect the aesthetic and even psychological aspects of the problem. The turbine installation was designed for high visibility, acknowledging the fact that many building owners are proud of their onsite renewable energy systems and want to be able to show them off. In a similar vein, the company is working on getting the turbine to start spinning at wind speeds as low as 4 miles per hour (mph; 2 m/s), whereas 6 to 8 mph (3 to 4 m/s) is more typical for small turbines, and the AVX400 currently starts at 7 mph (3 m/s). The AVX400 doesn’t generate much power at that speed, but it communicates to observers that something is happening, which helps to generate interest and a positive reaction.

EBN

Vol. 15, No. 7), in July 2006 SierraPine, Ltd., added a new medium-density fiberboard (MDF) to its no-added-formaldehyde MDF product family. Arreis™ (“Sierra” backwards), like Medex® and Medite® II, uses the non-formaldehyde polyurethane binder methyl diisocyanate (MDI). The product is made from 100% recycled wood fiber (certified by Scientific Certification Systems for recycled content) and meets the most stringent formaldehyde emission standards, including those proposed for California.

According to Triton, there are about 45,000 dams in the world over 100 meters (330’) tall. Most of these dams flooded land at a time when timber was considered a virtually unlimited resource. Clearcutting reservoir areas would have been time-consuming, so the typical practice was simply to flood standing forests; worldwide a timbered area twice the size of New Jersey is underwater. Triton conservatively calculates that over 300 million trees, preserved in the anaerobic underwater environment, are ready for harvest. That translates to 100 billion board feet of timber awaiting only an effective recovery process.

When Triton CEO Chris Godsall began looking at harvesting this forgotten treasure, he immediately identified the need to avoid the dangerous practice of sending human divers underwater with pneumatic chainsaws and, for efficiency and environmental reasons, to avoid the more common practice of pulling a tree up by its rootball. As a result, Triton developed the Sawfish™, which the company describes as “the world’s only deep-water logging machine.” The size of a minivan, the Sawfish is a submarine powered by an electric motor and tethered to a surface barge, where a human operator remotely “flies” it. Rated for depths up to 700 feet (200 m), the Sawfish begins harvesting a waterlogged tree by attaching and inflating one of the 50 reusable airbags it carries. Hovering above the reservoir bottom to avoid disturbing the ecology, the Sawfish grapples a tree trunk with hydraulic arms and cuts it with its 55-inch (1.4 m) chainsaw. Released by the Sawfish, the tree buoys up to the surface to be recovered by a team on a barge as the Sawfish moves to its next target. The Sawfish can harvest over 100 trees a shift, or one every five minutes, surfacing only to replenish airbags; power for the harvester is generated on the barge and transmitted through an electric cable in the tether.

In a press release, Jim Decker, a vice president for Progress Lighting, said, “Progress Lighting believes now is the time for LED systems to illuminate our homes and not two to five years from now like most industry analysts predict.” Manuel Lynch, president and CEO of Permlight, added, “We will make it known that this is the light source from now on.” Let’s take a look at these claims and what’s driving them.

Under California’s current Title 24 energy efficiency standards for buildings, high-efficacy luminaires—defined as those providing 40 lumens per watt (l/w) or higher—are required in most residential applications. Although metal halide lighting also meets this efficacy requirement, fluorescent lighting—primarily compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs)—has been until recently the only available technology suitable for residences. But fluorescents rely on mercury, a toxin and target of increasing regulation. With a rule enacted in February 2006 under California’s Title 22, both linear fluorescent lamps and CFLs are classified as hazardous waste, and it is illegal to dispose of them in household trash. LEDs do not contain mercury. This lack of mercury, and the reasonably high efficacy of Permlight’s Enbryten Down line of LED luminaires led BuildingGreen to recognize it as a Top-Ten product for 2005 (see

Sizing and placing of windows has always required balancing the need to provide daylight and views with the need to manage solar heat gain and limit heat loss. “Fundamentally, a static window with fixed properties is almost always a poor compromise between night and day, summer and winter, sunny and overcast,” says Stephen Selkowitz, who heads the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). A key solution, according to Selkowitz, is dynamic control of glazing, something his group has been investigating for twenty years. Finally, a viable dynamic glazing for skylights, windows, and fixed glazing has arrived: SageGlass® from Sage Electrochromics, Inc.

With SageGlass, the transmittance properties of the glazing can be switched from clear to a dark Prussian blue tint with the push of a button. SageGlass isn’t the first dynamic glazing to enter the market. Taliq Corporation, for example, developed an interior electrochromic glazing system that could be switched from clear to opaque (primarily for privacy in interior conference rooms), but the cost was high and the market limited, eventually putting the company out of business. A number of other manufacturers developed dynamic electrochromic glazings for exterior fenestration, but these efforts, like Taliq’s, relied on organic electrochromic layers and have failed.

Kohler’s Steward™ and Steward S urinals are the end-product of a two-year development cycle in which the company essentially reinvented the urinal, according to Shane Judd, product manager for toilets and commercial products at Kohler. “We started by asking ‘how would you make the best urinal possible?’,” recounted Judd. They identified splash as the biggest problem with today’s urinals and realized that a conical bowl is the best shape to prevent splash—but that you can’t have a conical bowl with a flush urinal. “We completely redesigned the shape,” Judd told

EBN.

Delta has achieved this performance by partnering with Bowles Fluidics Corporation. The technology that makes this performance possible comes from the automotive industry, where it was developed for windshield sprayers, according to Paul Patton, senior product development manager at Delta. An oscillation process controls the water droplets. “We tell the water how big the droplet should be and how fast it should come out,” said Patton. The water leaves the showerhead through four openings, and the droplets are fairly large, resulting in good heat retention and excellent body wetting.

By comparison, most low-flow showerheads either create very small droplets or aerate the water. In the former case, according to Patton, the water cools off quickly after leaving the showerhead; in the latter case, some cooling happens, and the showerhead is noisier. The H2Okinetics technology retains the same amount of heat 12 inches (300 mm) farther into the shower than most low-flow showerheads, according to Patton. This may result in moderate energy savings—beyond the energy savings achieved by using less water—by enabling users to shower at a cooler water mix.

Cashew nuts grow as appendages on the ends of cashew fruits, which are the size of apples. The nuts are encased in a leathery skin that is saturated with toxic oils, specifically cardol and anacardic acid. (An acquaintance bit into a raw cashew nut right off a tree and was unable to taste food for the next three days!) Cashew-nut shell liquid (CSNL) has a long history of industrial uses, including in typewriter rolls and brake linings. Since the 1950s, researchers have been experimenting with ways to use it as a binder in composite wood products. The biggest barriers to more widespread use of CSNL have been the low cost of petroleum and the natural variation in the chemistry of the oils.

EBN

Vol. 11, No. 1) and our recognition of that product as a 2002 Top-10 Green Building Product helped draw the green building community’s attention to the advantages of electric hand dryers. The breakthrough technology was a very-high-velocity airstream that blows water droplets off users’ hands. With this innovation, Excel achieves a 12- to 15-second drying time, and our analysis showed that each use requires less than one-fifth the energy it takes to dry hands with paper towels (assuming two paper towels made from recycled paper), or less than one-eighth the energy needed for virgin paper towels. World Dryer Corporation followed in 2005 with the similar AirMax high-speed dryer that has a purported 15-second drying time.

Most scratch-removal systems use a series of increasingly fine-grit abrasives to grind and polish glass. By contrast, GlasWeld’s patented G Force™ Scratch Removal System uses a “nonabrasive” buffing process with an orbital polishing machine, polishing disks, and a proprietary compound to heat up and realign the molecules of glass—removing scratches and restoring a smooth, polished surface.

To understand how the system works, you have to understand that glass is not a crystalline solid; it is an amorphous solid. As such, the molecules are not tightly held in place. According to product manager Shiloh Spoo, the G Force system uses a combination of chemical, thermal, and mechanical actions to realign the glass molecules and remove scratches. The system relies on the specialized (nonhazardous) polishing compound, the orbital action of the polishing machine (similar to an electric drill, but faster rotating), pressure applied by the user (about 15 pounds, 70 newtons, of force), and the resultant moderate heat (135°–185°F, 57°–85°C) to realign the glass molecules, rebuilding a smooth surface. “We’ve been able to develop a system that affects the glass at a molecular level without removing the surface,” Spoo told