Clean Development Mechamism (CDM): perception of the Brazilian enterprises’ sectors

Atualmente, o aumento na temperatura média da superfície da terra é um desafio para a sociedade. Há grande mobilização internacional, associada aos recursos financeiros, políticos e de engenharia, para impedir o agravamento das emissões de gases de efeito estufa. Este estudo é uma tentativa de entender como o setor privado brasileiro percebe o desafio (e se posiciona diante dele) do novo mercado em formação e do novo paradigma que emerge diante dessa questão ambiental global. O objetivo da pesquisa foi identificar as principais barreiras ao desenvolvimento dos projetos de MDL, para empresas brasileiras. Os resultados da pesquisa apontam o alto custo dos projetos e a falta de conhecimento técnico na área como os principais fatores que dificultam a maior difusão dos projetos de MDL.Nowadays, the increase of Earth’s average temperature consists of an enormous challenge to our society. There has been a lot of international mobilization, associated with the amount of inancial, political and engineering resources interested in preventing the aggravating of the green house gases effects. In this article, it is presented a pioneer survey attempting to understand how the Brazilian private sector sees the issue; how they are positioning themselves to face the climate crisis, how they will cope with the new market emerging and the new paradigm from this global environmental issue. The results found appoint that the main barriers for the development of CDM projects, according to the Brazilian companies surveyed, are the high costs associated with these projects and the lack of technical knowledge on the ield

Influence of the starting materials on performance of high temperature oxide fuel cells devices

High temperature solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer an environmentally friendly technology to convert gaseous fuels such as hydrogen, natural gas or gasified coal into electricity at high efficiencies. Besides the efficiency, higher than those obtained from the traditional energy conversion systems, a fuel cell provides many other advantages like reliability, modularity, fuel flexibility and very low levels of NOx and SOx emissions. The high operating temperature (950-1000 °C) used by the current generation of the solid oxide fuel cells imposes severe constraints on materials selection in order to improve the lifetime of the cell. Besides the good electrical, electrochemical, mechanical and thermal properties, the individual cell components must be stable under the fuel cell operating atmospheres. Each material has to perform not only in its own right but also in conjunction with other system components. For this reason, each cell component must fulfill several different criteria. This paper reviews the materials and the methods used to fabricate the different cell components, such as the cathode, the electrolyte, the anode and the interconnect. Some remarkable results, obtained at IPEN (Nuclear Energy Research Institute) in São Paulo, have been presented