12-21-11

Today however, was the worst weather I've seen at Pole. Apparently they found some of our packing material blowing across the skiway at midnight and people didn't get out to the drill camp until about 8 this morning so things had quite some time to blow around. However, by mid afternoon it was nothing but blue skies. I missed an opportunity to take a photo of some sun dogs and the 22 degree halo, but that's the way it goes.

We had a little bit of work left to do on our part of the sled, which wasn't much fun in the wind. We also spent some time looking for paperwork and parts that had blown around and/or had snow drift over them.















So part of our project is to supply power to our experimental stations without having to lay cable from the South Pole Station itself. Our current plan is to use solar panels to provide power during the summer and windmills to provide power during the winter. The weather at the South Pole is actually quite mild, and so it could be weeks or months without having sufficient winds to generate electricity for our stations. One challenge that comes with all this is the batteries have to be kept warm to hold their charge, which means using some electricity to keep the batteries warm, but it could be weeks without any power generation which is a long time to keep batteries warm. We are currently experimenting with different windmill types to see how they perform and hold up in these conditions. All of our wind turbines are dumping all the electricity generated on big resistors mounted on their stands. I thought this windmill got busted in the wind, but apparently it's part of the furling mechanism to tilt the wind turbine up at an angle to reduce the wind loading on it during high winds.



















This is another wind turbine we are testing, and it uses an electric brake as a furling mechanism.















And here is what the ICL looked like from that wind turbine site.















This is another wind turbine we are testing, and it was actually designed to run in higher winds. It was on the verge of using it's furling mechanism which is to turn the tail 90 degrees so the blades are facing sideways into the wind rather than face on.















And this is looking back towards the ICL from that wind turbine site. If you zoom in, you can make out the buildings in the middle of the photo.














We also went out to the drill site today, but the drillers were taking the day off because they have been working long hours for a long time now and the weather made it quite difficult to get the generator started.















The drill site does have a break room which is a sea container where both sides fold out like a camping trailer. The break room is heated and has power and apparently there will be a toilet towed out later this week or early next week.















The microwave in the break room.














We went out there to check the hole that the drillers made yesterday. They went down about 100 meters, but we were only able to lower down a 6 inch diamter circle 280 feet. Here you can see a camera being placed in the drill hole. The circle with the red wires sticking off is used to keep the camera, which is inside of the bottle, centered in the hole. We use the footage to get feedback on how the drilling was going as well as to look for any voids or anything that could cause a problem when we lower our equipment down the hole.














In this photo you might be able to see a little better how the camera fits inside of the bottle, but then again you might not.
















This is looking back towards the drill camp. If you look carefully enough to the left of the green flag or in the center of the photo, you may be able to make out the tower from the previous wind turbine.














We also drove out to the test bed site, which is where we installed all the equipment last year. Here you can see the flags marking the site, but everything has been buried under the drifting snow.














In the background of this shot is the drill camp at the new site.














They also moved a wind turbine out to right near the test bed site to see how it impacts our experiment. We would like to have the wind turbines as close to each site as possible as it reduces the amount of trenching and cable involved. Our concern though is that the RF noise generated by the wind turbine itself, the charging equipment, and the sporadic static discharge caused by the blowing snow on the guy-wires will create too much background noise for our radio antennas. We'll leave this setup out there for a year and see how it impacts our data.