Visit at The Brazilian center for research in energy and materials (CNPEM)

Visit at The Brazilian center for research in energy and materials (CNPEM) - Campanas Wednesday 2011-02-23

In the afternoon we took our bus to Campanas and CNPEM, The Brazilian center for research in energy and materials that gathers three national laboratories opened to academics and industry:

Synchrotron (LNLS) and Bioethanol Science and Technology (CTBE) that we got to see and also Bioscience (LNBio).

We started the visit at the Synchrotron, an important rsearch instrument that was taken into operation in 1997, after 14 years of work and $35 of investment only for the accelerator ring.

The Synchrotron Light Source at LNLS is the only one in operation in the Latin America and one of only two equipments in the southern hemisphere. A variety of scientific instruments complements the syncrotron ring for making studies of Advanced materials, Nanoscience, Biotechnology etc.

The laboratory is anually used by more than 1600 researchers from universitiers and industries all over the world. The operation is from Monday morning to Saturday morning in timesteps of 11 hours which is the lifetime of the current producing the light.

The machine delivers light of energy levels from ultra violet to heavy x-ray and has similar performance as MAX-II in Lund, the guide says. And he knows what he talk about, because LNLS has a close co-operation with MAX-lab and a collegue of him is currently in Sweden, involved in the construction of MAX-IV, the next generation synchrotron ring in Sweden.

In resent years, with increasing amount of users, LNLS has also seen a need to build a Light Source for high performance, much brighter than today, with much broader energy spectrum, to maintain the competitiveness of Brazilian science. Still there are many years left until this dream can come true.

During the laset couple of years, the area of bio ethanol has become of mayor interest. The goal of this research is to improve ethanol production as a step to replace gasoline with a renewable energy source. Production of ethanol and cobustion engines running this kind of fuel is not new but was a hot subject also in the 1980th when the price of oil was soaring.

At that time, the engines were design to run on pure ethanol, creating problems when the oil got cheeper than the alcohol again. This time, the investment is more of a long term project, requieringa sustainable production of ethanol and flexifuel engines, accepting either ethanol, petroleum or a mix of them. In Brazil, all petrolium sold for cars is now days mixed with 25% ethanol.

CTBE is a research center focused on ethanol production from sugar canes, an organisation still under construction, where they proudly guided us around. CTBE, to the mayor part finaced by the Brazilian government, but also from industrial partners as Petrobras aims to find solutions to the technological bottlenecks in the production of ethanol from sugarcane. Their main goal is to find an efficient and sustainable technology for converting sugarcane biomass into energy.

The research facility has numberous of machines for doing small scale experiments of converting sugarcane to alcohol and currently a test platform for production of ethanol is being built.

The laboratory submit that there are major advantages in the process because it can control the amount of sugar which is required for ethanol production and food respectively. They claim that a too high useage of sugarecane for producing fuel may affect the price of the soybean and affect the agricultural choice, which must be avoided.

The CTBE has a world wide co-operation in this research area, spacially with Swedish universities where there is a formal collaboration between CTBE, Rayal Institute of Technology and Lund University.