Fuel cells : Power for tomorrow

127 tr. ; 18 cm

Transfer of information from researcher to consumer: choosing the appropriate media

The adoption of solar technologies in the marketplace will not come about simply because solar energy has many advantages to offer. As with all innovations, it must be sold through a variety of media, not just to the ultimate user but to several target audiences. For many reasons, not the least of which is cost, those seeking to speed the diffusion of the solar innovation must be sure of the objectivity, timeliness, comprehensiveness, and clarity of their messages before commencing the task of disseminating them

Fuel Cells : Power for Tomorrow

127 tr. ; 18 cm

L"avenir Commence Aujourd"hui

208 tr. ; 18 cm

Diffusion of solar innovations through television news programming

The rationale, methodology, finished product, and evaluation of a series of short, topical films of various solar applications are presented. They were produced for use on prime-television news programming

The state of the art in biomimetics

Biomimetics is a research field that is achieving particular prominence through an explosion of new discoveries in biology and engineering. The field concerns novel technologies developed through the transfer of function from biological systems. To analyze the impact of this field within engineering and related sciences, we compiled an extensive database of publications for study with network-based information analysis techniques. Criteria included publications by year and journal or conference, and subject areas judged by popular and common terms in titles. Our results reveal that this research area has expanded rapidly from less than 100 papers per year in the 1990s to several thousand papers per year in the first decade of this century. Moreover, this research is having impact across a variety of research themes, spanning robotics, computer science and bioengineering. In consequence, biomimetics is becoming a leading paradigm for the development of new technologies that will potentially lead to significant scientific, societal and economic impact in the near future

Potential for wind energy generation in Piracicaba, SP, Brazil

Wind power has gained space in Brazil's energy matrix, being a clean source and inexhaustible. Therefore, it becomes important to characterize the wind potential of a given location, for future applications. The main objective of the present study was to estimate the wind energy potential in Piracicaba, SP, Brazil. The wind speed data were collected by an anemometer installed at the Meteorological Station Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, Piracicaba-SP. The wind speed variability was represented by the Weibull frequency distribution, a probability density function of two parameters (k and c). The parameters k and c were used to correlate the Gamma function with the annual average wind speed, the variance and power mean density. A wind profile was made to evaluate the behavior of historical average speeds at higher altitudes measured by anemometer, to estimate the gain in power density. The values of k for all heights were close to 1 which corresponds to a wind regime highly variable, and c values were also low representing a low average speed of the location. The location was characterized as being unfavorable for the application of wind turbines for power generation