My first day in the lab got off to an early start as Adriana, Andre, and I got up at 6am to avoid the heinous rush hour traffic. The building I work at is in downtown Rio, in a large building full of offices and labs called INT: Instituto National de Tecnologia (National Institue of Technology). In total INT employs about 70 researchers. I work on the third floor, in the biocatalyst lab.
Disclamer: the quality of the following explanations and descriptions of my lab and the work we are doing is limited by my ability to comprehend technical descriptions delivered in Portuguese.
Adriana gave me a tour of floor 5, where she works in the catalyst lab. To my understanding they are working on developing efficient ways of using ethanol (because it is easily produced and readily accessable in Brazil) to produce hydrogen as an energy source. They have buses here that run off of hydrogen. The catalyst machine in the picture below is one of the tools they are using to experiment with different inputs of ethanol, water, and oxygen to achieve the greatest per-unit yields of hydrogen gas. Many of the nauances of the process were over my head, like how to minimize the accumulation of carbon on the nickel and cobalt coatings during the reactions by injecting oxygen. When I asked whether this process of ethanol to hydrogen to power is more efficient than just burning the ethanol directly the answer I got was that theoretically yes; but practically, not yet. Thats what they´re working towards.
That´s Mauro next to the catalyst machine. He is a great guy and helped explain much of the process to me. The labs here are brand shiny new and well-equiped. Of course so is the Doty lab where I work at UW but still, I was impressed.
Also like my lab in Seattle, I am part of a diverse group of researchers. My lab has 5 other people that I´ve met so far. While several are Brazilian, we have Javier the Bolivian and myself, the American. Javier and I both get harangued for our "portanhol" combo of portuguese spiced up with spanish words.
My boss, and the leader of our division at INT, is Dr. Viridiana Santana Ferreira-Leitao. She is a natural leader and has a clear vision of her work that she conveys passionately and convincingly. We sat down and she explained our mission and how it fits into the broader network of research in Brazil. INT here in Rio has three divisions: Adriana´s lab working on converting ethanol to hydrogen, my lab working on second-generation ethanol, and the mysterious "third lab" that is top secret. Not really but I just had trouble understanding Viridiana´s explanation in Portuguese and didn´t want to keep asking about it. I´ll figure it out soon.
Ethanol 2nd generation is ethanol produced from the scraps and waste of traditional ethanol production. Essentially 1st generation uses all the easily accesible sugars and tosses the leaves and spent, crushed stems (called baggase) away. 2nd generation takes the leaves and baggase and essentially recycles them, getting additional ethanol out of the waste. This may seem like common sense but the technology did not previous exist to make this second pass worthwhile. Now the tech is here and it is a promising new field where the source material (baggase and leaves) and infrastructure (ethanol producing facilities and equipment) are already in place. My lab is focusing on ways to make this process of extracting the 2nd generation ethanol more efficient. Javier, for example, is researching different strains of yeast to use in the fermentation stage of ethanol production, trying to find those that work best. In other parts of the lab we have projects going on substituting CO2 for SO2 in the steam pretreatment stage (cheaper and greener) and "farming" bacteria which give off hydrogen gas that can be harvested.
My work in particular is in information technology. Essentially I am working on publishing a paper with Viridiana on the current state of 2nd generation ethanol around the world. Who is producing it, how they do, what plants they use, what technologies they use, how efficient they are, what kind of patents they have, and so on. I will be researching these questions via online databases. But I will also participate in experiments going on in my lab. I am not running my own experiment because 2 months in the lab here is not sufficient time to complete an entire experiement and Viridiana puts a lot of stock in me having some tangible end product (i.e. published paper) to show for myself once I´m gone.
A Day in the Jungle:
I must have really done a great job at work the first day, because I was awarded a day off today. Or maybe thats a bad sign... Actually I´m just not officially starting until Monday. So I spent the day exploring, this time heading for the hills instead of the beach. I hiked up a trail to Morro de Urca, the stepping stone to the famous Sugar Loaf. I didn´t want to take any cable cars, but was determined to get some stellar views so I went branching off on little sub-trails and climbing whatever I could to get a view.
Above is what the main trail looked like. Very steep but had lots of steps, roots, and branches to facilitate navigation. I made my way to the base of Sugar Loaf and was able to climb up the rocks to get above the vegetation. Here was the view looking back towards downtown Rio (the distant cluster of large buildings in the bottom two photos) where I work at INT.
After that I hiked to the top of Morro de Urca where the first cable car arrives from the beach, and the second one takes you up to Sugar Loaf. On my way over I found an abondoned steel structure that is was either the remains of an earlier cable system or some kind of communications tower. Regardless, it made for great climbing and I scaled it to get an amazing view looking back at Sugar Loaf and the surroundings.If you look real close at the first and last photos you can see a guy rock climbing up the face of Sugar Loaf. There were anchors bolted in all the way up the thing.
Also encountered some leaf-cutter ants hard at work on the trail:
I found another abandoned metal structure and climbed it too, got a few more neat pics from the top.
Then I made my up to the top of Morro de Urca where I emerged in the plaza where the cable cars come and go. Lots of other people around, many tourists, heard a fair amount of english. I took some more photos of the amazing views from up there. There were helicopters giving sight-seeing tours over the city, and I caught pics of one taking off. Given my lack of funds to shell out on tourist activities that was about the best I could do. My apartment building is visible on the left side of the helicopter picture, in the neighborhood of Botafogo.
On my way out I met up with a young American couple and showed them the way down via the jungle trail. I got to speak english and for the first time in a while (since talking to Steve I guess) I actually felt articulate. As we neared the bottom of the trail they mentioned that on their cable car ride to the top of Sugar Loaf they saw some crazy guy climbing around on a metal scaffolding structure in the middle of the jungle below the car. I answered that yeah, that was me.
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