Despite the fact that silicon is the market common semiconductor in many electric units, which includes the solar cells that solar panels utilize to convert sun rays into electricity, it is not really the most efficient component readily available. For example, the semiconductor gallium arsenide and related substance semiconductors give practically twice the effectiveness as silicon in photo voltaic products, however they are rarely utilized in utility-scale applications because of their high manufacturing value.

University. of I. (http://illinois.edu/) teachers J. Rogers and X. Li investigated lower-cost methods to produce thin films of gallium arsenide that also allowed adaptability in the types of products they could be integrated into.

If you could minimize substantially the cost of gallium arsenide and other compound semiconductors, then you could expand their own variety of applications.

Usually, gallium arsenide is placed in a individual thin layer on a small wafer. Either the ideal device is made right on the wafer, or the semiconductor-coated wafer is cut up into chips of the preferred size. The Illinois group chose to put in several levels of the material on a single wafer, creating a layered, “pancake” stack of gallium arsenide thin films.

If you grow 10 levels in a single growth, you simply have to load the wafer 1 time. If you do this in 10 growths, loading and unloading with temp ramp-up as well as ramp-down take a lot of time. If you consider what is required for every growth – the equipment, the preparation, the period, the workers – the overhead saving this method provides is a considerable expense reduction.

Next the experts individually peel off the layers and move them. To achieve this, the stacks alternate layers of aluminum arsenide with the gallium arsenide. Bathing the stacks in a solution of acid and an oxidizing agent dissolves the levels of aluminum arsenide, freeing the single thin sheets of gallium arsenide. A soft stamp-like device picks up the levels, just one at a time from the top down, for transfer to one more substrate – glass, plastic-type or silicon, depending on the application. Then the wafer can be reused for an additional growth.

By executing this it’s possible to create considerably more material much more quickly and more price efficiently. This process could create bulk amounts of material, as compared to merely the thin single-layer manner in which it is generally grown.

Freeing the material from the wafer additionally opens the possibility of flexible, thin-film electronics produced with gallium arsenide or other high-speed semiconductors. To make products that can conform but still retain higher performance, which is significant.

In a paper shared on-line May twenty in the publication Nature (http://www.nature.com/), the team explains its techniques and displays 3 types of units making use of gallium arsenide chips produced in multilayer stacks: light units, high-speed transistors and photo voltaic cells. The creators also supply a comprehensive price evaluation.

One more advantage of the multilayer method is the release from area constraints, especially crucial for photo voltaic cells. As the layers are taken away from the stack, they could be laid out side-by-side on another substrate to create a much bigger surface area, whereas the standard single-layer procedure confines area to the dimension of the wafer.

For solar panels, you want large area coverage to get as much sunlight as possible. In an extreme situation we could develop adequate levels to have 10 times the area of the standard.

Next, the team programs to explore more potential unit applications and additional semiconductor materials that could adapt to multilayer growth.

About the Article author – Shannon Combs writes for the residential solar power products weblog, her personal hobby website based on ideas to aid home owners to conserve energy with solar power.

Complete Bio Photo of the Author
http://www.residentialsolarpanels.org/about

SAO PAULO (AFP) – Brazil on Wednesday sought to uncover the cause of a massive and mysterious blackout overnight, amid concerns of energy supply stability for the 2016 Olympic host nation.

The outage, which hit at 10:15 pm Tuesday (0015 GMT Wednesday) and lasted four to six hours, plunged nearly half the country into darkness.

An estimated 50 million people — more than a quarter of Brazil’s 190-million-strong population — were affected, mainly in the major cities in the southern part of the country, including Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Off-duty police were called up as thousands were trapped in immobile elevators and subway trains. Cars were forced to nose through intersections made dangerous by suddenly extinguished traffic lights. Some cafes closed out of fear of a nocturnal crime wave.

Power was mostly returned before dawn, though several areas remained without energy, including nearly a quarter of the state of Minas Gerais, according to Globo television news.

Blame for the emergency was leveled at the Itaipu hydro-electric station that straddles the border between Brazil and Paraguay and supplies both countries with much of their energy needs.

Brazilian Energy Minister Edson Lobao said the problem originated there, possibly because a storm shorted out one of its five transmission lines.

Paraguay, which gets 90 percent of its power from the huge plant, was left in the dark for 15 minutes during the outage.

But Furnas, Brazil’s state-owned electricity company responsible for the affected area, said in a statement on Wednesday that it found no problem with the facility’s lines.

“Furnas’s transmission lines that link the Itaipu plant to the national interlinked grid are operating normally and no damage has been identified in its circuits and transmission towers,” it said.

It said that the National Electric Grid Operator “is seeking the causes of the blackout,” adding: “Any diagnostic at this time is purely speculative.”

The head of the Itaipu facility, Jorge Miguel Samek, told Globo he also believed a storm was likely behind the cut in power from the second-biggest hydro-electric plant in the world.

An energy ministry spokesman told AFP three of the plant’s transmission lines failed during the emergency.

Despite Furnas’s statement, the ministry’s secretary, Marcio Zimmerman, speculated that an unspecified “adverse meteorological condition” set off a “domino effect” through the grid.

Itaipu has an output of 14,000 megawatts, which supplies 20 percent of the energy needs of Brazil, Latin America’s most economically active nation. All of that was off-line overnight.

The blackout occurred two nights after the US television network CBS broadcast a report in which unidentified former US national security officials claimed massive power outages in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 were caused by cyber hackers attacking control systems.

Although Brazilian media were skeptical of that assessment, the US channel said those incidents should serve as a wake-up call to the United States, which could see its own power supplies hit by computer sabotage.

Brazil’s energy ministry was to hold an urgent meeting later Wednesday with all the country’s grid operators to determine the exact causes of the outage and what can be down to prevent a repetition.

Authorities are especially concerned about the damage that might be done to Brazil’s reputation ahead of Rio hosting the 2016 Olympic Games and the 2014 football World Cup.

The city, which is already struggling with rampant crime, was the worst-affected by the power cut, according to electricity grid officials.

A Portuguese consortium is preparing to build the largest biodiesel plant in the country, which will operate with 90% of its raw material – mainly soybean and sunflower – from Brazil, Angola and Mozambique.

The refinery should start operating in 2010 and has an annual capacity of 250k tons, according to a shareholder. The rest of the raw material will come from Portugal, and can be soybean, rapeseed and palm.

Operation

The consortium, known as GreenCyber is owned by Hagen construction, of individual investors and the bank EFISA.

The refinery will be built at the port of Sines, south of Portugal, where the biodiesel can be exported and with easy access to roads and railways that connect the country to Spain.

The refinery will try to take advantage of the government’s objective to reduce dependence on oil, in addition to reach the target of a mixture of 10% in diesel by 2010, or 600k tons per year.

Extension

Acording to the investor Pedro Sampaio Nunes, the refinery could easily expand the capacity.  “Our facility allows us to easily triple our capacity, which I believe will happen in the next 10 years,” he said.

Portugal currently has four refineries to produce biodiesel, producing a total of 500k tons per year.

Oxfam, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to combating poverty in the world, believes the Brazilian ethanol is the most favorable biofuel in the world in terms of emissions of polluting gases and cost.

The report says that the replacement of traditional fuels by biofuels has led more than 30 million people to poverty and are not helping to combat climate change.

According to the document, the so-called “green policies” of developed countries are contributing to the increase in prices of food – which reaches more poor people.

The text cites as the World Bank, which estimates that the price of food rose 83% in the last three years.

The author of the report, Robert Bailey, criticized the subsidies and tax incentives “generous” granted by rich countries to support its own production of biofuel, including targets and rapidly increasing taxes on imports, which “has been used to protect interests of its farmers “.

“Rich countries spend up to $ 15 billion last year to support its own biofuels at the same time as they prevent the entry of Brazilian ethanol, which is cheaper and is much less harmful to global food security and the environment , “He said.

“This is the same amount that Oxfam says it is necessary to help the poor cope with the crisis of food.”

The report by Oxfam says: “While the production of Brazilian ethanol is far from perfect and present various social problems and environmental sustainability, this is the most favorable biofuel in the world in terms of cost and balance of greenhouse gases”.

The document includes a comparison with the biofuel from corn produced in the United States, saying that their production is highly dependent on fossil fuels, representing “one of the worst” balance between greenhouse gases and use of energy.

The report asks the European Union (EU) to cancel the goal of ensuring that 10% of transport on the block to use biofuels by 2020. Oxfam estimates that the EU target can increase carbon emissions 70 times by 2020 because of the change in the use of land.

There is expectation that another report – the expected “Gallagher report,” a reference to Ed Gallagher, an academic at the head of the Agency for Renewable Fuels of Great Britain – to be released later this week, leading to a review of the goals of Great Britain – Britain and the European Union on the use of fuels derived from plants.

The British government introduced a percentage of 2.5% of biofuels for transport in April last.

Oxfam calls for caution

For developing countries, Oxfam recommends caution in the conduct of its programs to produce biofuels, because although they are “an alternative source of sustainable energy for the poor in marginalised areas, the potential economic costs, social and environmental can be high” .

These countries should plan its programs for long-term, avoiding ambitious targets and analyse the impact of biofuels in society.
Oxfam also provides recommendations for companies and investors. The NGO in its report suggests that they should make sure that none of biofuel project takes place without first obtaining the consent of local communities, and should promote access to energy in remote areas.

Alcohol sales in the home market by the end of May (adding up anhydrous and hydrated) recorded an increase of 31.6% over the same period in 2007. In the case of hydrated ethanol, growth was 43.6%. Antonio de Padua Rodrigues, technical director of Unica, said that the product exporting in the months of April and May, totaled about 600 million litres, exceeding 59% in the volume board in the same period of last year’s harvest.

The results are not finalized yet, more test are required to find out the scale of the reserve, if confirmed the coast of Rio de Janeiro would be the third-largest oil field in the world according to NPA.

In the NPA you can find an explanation for the statements made by the director-general of the ANP about the discovery:
# The comments made by the Director-General of the ANP were official, as published by various media.
# All information already was of public knowledge, and was even published in the February edition of the journal World Oil, column What’s new in exploration, signed by Arthur Berman.
To read the rest of the explanation go to ANP website.

After carrying out several internal technical and economic studies, the company decided the best option was to reuse the P-54 project to build the P-62. In effect, Petrobras intends to “clone” platform P-54.

The P-62 will be a FPSO (Production, Storage, and Off-loading) type unit capable of producing 180,000 barrels of oil per day, of storing 1.8 million barrels of oil, and of compressing 6 million cubic meters of natural gas. The unit will be anchored at a water depth of 1,545 metres.

The P-54 was built in a period of 41 months after three agreements were signed in June 2004. The gas compression modules were built by the Dresser-Rand and Maua Jurong consortium.

The power generation module was made by Nuovo Pignone, while Jurong Shipyard was in charge of the hull conversion, in Singapore, and also of constructing the unit’s other modules. Jurong Shipyard was also in charge of integrating the unit at the Mauá shipyard, in Niterói.

source » Baird Online

After 20 years of being behind US in soy export Brazil with honors surpass US becoming the #1 exporter of Soy in the world in 2007, and also the #1 exporter of coffee, orange juice and beef.

Since the president Lula released the law that says Brazil has to mix 5% of Biodiesel in regular Diesel by the end of 2012 many small farmers from northeast are harvesting Castor Oil and Jatropha to sell for Biodiesel refineries.

The incentives for planting for Biodiesel production are enormous, some refinery are buying the harvest of 5 years in advance and there’s a chance of this small cooperatives of farmers to get some money out of the Kyoto’s Protocol too.

The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the international Framework Convention on Climate Change with the objective of reducing Greenhouse gases that cause climate change. It was agreed on 11 December 1997 at the 3rd Conference of the Parties to the treaty when they met in Kyoto, and entered into force on 16 February 2005.

That means Brazil no longer needs to import energy from other country to supply its necessity. On the other hand Brazil is becoming a Global Exporter since its production is large.

Brazilian drivers are used to being able to use whichever fuel they want, currently the drivers has at least 4 types of fuel to choose from » gasoline, diesel, ethanol and natural gas.

Many of the cars produced recently can use two types of fuel at the same type also known as “hybrid vehicles”. In big cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro many drivers are adding natural gas tank to their cars to save money.

Brazil is the World’s leading Country in Bio Fuels! Over 30 years ago in order to find a renewable and greener source of fuel, the Brazilian Government started the “Ethanol Boom” and has been successful ever since; for today, 8 out of 10 cars manufactured in Brazil have the so called “Flex Power” engines. These engines can run both in Alcohol Ethanol as well as with gasoline in any blend

Let us dream about a World free of CO2! Let us take part in this Green Revolution that Brazil has started. It’s no longer a dream… It’s reality!!! Well at least in South America! How about the WHOLE WORLD gone green?
Let us make that happen! mother earth will thank us!

source » http://youtube.com/watch?v=sfVVRFa5KDc