Preliminary Program Introduction and Highlights

Plenary Address
Renewable Energy – Innovative Solutions and Trends
Presented by Billy G. Johansson, Seabased AB, Uppsala, Sweden
Sunday Evening, May 10, after the Opening Ceremonies, Awards Presentations and Annual Business Meeting at 7:00 p.m.

In a high-level seminar arranged in September 2008 by the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, discussions took place about the rapid increase of carbon dioxide content in the air. Some delegates compared the situation with writing a book and suggested that chapter one was ready. Chapter one dealt with the problem of getting the world to understand that carbon dioxide increase is a problem. The delegates were in agreement that the problem was understood. It is now necessary to find the best solutions and act. The future will show if this book turned out to be a drama, a thriller or, if we are lucky, a comedy.  To succeed in this we cannot just act as we have always done by improving the existing solutions. We need to have a new type of wild, daring and humanitarian solution, but still cost-efficient. Innovative solutions must be found. Any idea/solution initially has to be “tested” intellectually against the Physical Laws. Few politicians know the facts about different renewable energies. The facts for average power: sun – 100W/m², wind (11m/s) – 1kW/m², wave (Sweden) = 5-10Kw/m wave, wave (USA) = 15-60kW/m wave, and underwater current (2m/s) – 4kW/m². Another interesting fact is that the number of full load hours differs a lot as follows: sun – 1,000 h/year, wind (Sweden) – 2,200 h/year, wave (Sweden) – 3,000 to 4,000 h/year, wave (USA) – 3,000 to 6,000 h/year, and underwater currents – 7,000 h/year. Having these facts as background, three new ways of extracting renewable energy have been invented in Sweden. For wind energy there is a solution that uses a vertical arrangement, which of course, will lead to better cost performance and lower risk for failures or breakdown. For wave energy, the solution is based on a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) placed on the seabed (well protected) having a point absorber driving a linear generator. Arrays of WECs are then connected via underwater switchgears to the grid.  For underwater current, the solution is based on a vertical arranged turbine with a slow speed generator. This will also result in a minimum or no negative influence on the environment.  The trend we see nowadays is an increased focus on environment friendly solutions that will get even stronger in the future. However, it is important to question solutions that are not cost-effective and do not focus on the environment for the whole supply chain, including recycling.

Billy Johansson is a businessman who has been working all his professional life with energy producing plants. His background reveals many interesting and daring projects, such as building and delivering a turnkey hydropower plant in Jammu Kashmir, India with a total value of 880 MUSD, during his time as President of ABB Generation. Also, he is a negotiator and among other things succeeded in settling the Swedish Claim against the Romanian state in 2001, an affair that had been going on since the 50s. Currently, he is working with wave power, an interesting concept, with a unique solution in which he strongly believes. His references include 28 years work for ABB in Sweden, 6 years with INC International Negotiation Consultants AB, and 5 years with Seabased AB.

Keynote Presentation
Thin Film Technology for Energy Applications
Presented by Mark R. Pinto,  Applied Materials, Santa Clara, CA
Monday Morning, May 11, at 8:30 a.m.

Over 40 years of thin film process innovations have helped enable the IC industry today to produce well over 1018 transistors per year at costs of nanodollars per transistor, thereby empowering the information age.  Likewise, large area thin film manufacturing has dramatically improved the performance and cost of low-cost displays over the past 15 years, enabling high definition video from the handheld to the wall-mounted HDTV.  The overwhelming societal and market pull today for new solutions in the field of clean energy offers an exciting opportunity to build on a similar base of technology.  Through a combination of materials innovation and highly productive processing platforms we have the potential to enable new solutions for conservation, conversion and storage and thus profoundly change the economics of clean energy.

Mark R. Pinto is a Senior Vice President of Applied Materials where he serves both as the corporate Chief Technology Officer and as the General Manager of the Energy and Environmental Solutions business including the company’s efforts in solar manufacturing solutions. Prior to joining Applied, he spent 19 years with Bell Laboratories where he was involved in R&D and management of IC technology, optoelectronics and design. Dr. Pinto holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was named both a Bell Labs Fellow and also of the IEEE for his contributions to semiconductor technology.


The Donald M. Mattox Tutorial Program
Advances and Drawbacks of Microwave Plasmas
Presenter: Michel Moisan, Groupe de Physique des Plasmas, Université de Montréal, Canada and Laboratoire International de Technologies et Applications des Plasmas (LIA-LITAP)
Monday Afternoon, May 11, 12:30 p.m. - 1:10 p.m.

As compared to conventional RF capacitive or inductive discharges, microwave-sustained plasmas exhibit some specific characteristics: i) the electric field sustaining the discharge is provided by wave propagation either along dielectric materials (including the plasma itself) or within the structure of field applicators that radiate outwardly to penetrate dielectric discharge vessels (transparent to microwaves): there are no electrodes in contact with the discharge (increased lifetime and/or operating time of systems) and no self-biasing of the field applicators (less damage to substrates); ii) electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) allows to sustain efficiently discharges in the 0.1-10 mTorr (collisionless) pressure range; iii) impedance matching is easier, more efficient and reproducible than with RF systems. Nonetheless, microwave plasmas suffer from severe difficulties compared to other technologies (corona and dielectric barrier discharges at atmospheric pressure, RF discharges at reduced pressure) in the two main sectors of industrial applications, namely chemistry in gaseous phase and plasma processing of surfaces. These are essentially: i) the (radial) contraction of microwave (tubular) discharges typically at pressures above 10-20 Torr and, additionally, filamentation at frequencies above 1 GHz; ii) difficulty of scaling up microwave plasma sources for surface treatments. Design, performance and applications of new generations of microwave plasma sources are reviewed.

Michel Moisan is Professor of Physics at Université de Montréal (UdeM), a leading French-speaking university located in Montréal, Québec. After completing a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics at UdeM, he received a Doctorat d’État (D.Sc.) in Plasma Physics at Université Paris-XI (Orsay) followed by a post-doc at Institutes of the Academy of Sciences in the former USSR. His main field of interest is the design, development and modeling of microwave plasma sources. Some of these plasma sources were put to use in applications such as polymer etching, abatement of greenhouse gases, diamond film deposition and, more recently, plasma sterilization of medical devices. He has co-edited Microwave Discharges (with C.M. Ferreira) and Microwave Excited Plasmas (with J. Pelletier) and published, with Jacques Pelletier, Physique des Plasmas Collisionnels: Introduction aux Décharges HF, a French textbook. He is the co-author of 28 families of patents and numerous well-cited papers.


The Donald M. Mattox Tutorial Program
Coatings for Automotive Applications
Presenter: Erich Bergmann, École D’ingeniéurs de Genève, University of Applied Science of Western Switzerland, Geneva, Switzerland
Wednesday Afternoon, May 13, 12:20 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Wear protecting PVD coatings were first introduced on a large scale to automotive applications in the early eighties; AlSn20Co nanocomposite coatings on conrod bearings were the materials which enabled the introduction of the first turbocharged diesel engines.  However, the big wave started with the introduction of the WC/C coatings for the new hydraulic cam followers of the common rail system by Balzers/Bosch/INA.  From then on, the application of PVD coatings spread quickly to a wide range of components. PVD coatings for automotive components have become the fastest growing sector of PVD wear protection coatings and the main enabler of innovations in cars. Today PVD coatings can be found in almost every system of a car.  This tutorial will present the requirements and wear mechanisms of the most important subsystems of cars and compare them with the PVD coatings currently used.  A special focus will be given to the recent and current developments for engine components.

Erich Bergmann received his Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from the University of Graz, Austria, before joining the international center of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva, where his research focused on surface science applications in electrochemistry and tribology. He built the first solid-state fuel cell with a lifetime of 1000 hours in 1978. He then joined the Swatch group where he developed self-lubricating coatings for watch movements and decorative coatings for cases and bracelets. He built and managed the first deco-coating center outside Japan. In 1983 he presented the first black-coated watches at the Basel Fair: The Ferrari Collection of Cartier. He joined Balzers as Head of Development for wear-resistant coatings in 1984 and remained in that position for 10 years, introducing new tool coatings, arc coating technology, the first large scale wear part coatings: Balinit C (WC/C) and the first industrial scale diamond coatings. Since 1984, he has been Professor of Material Science at the Geneva School of Engineering and an industrial consultant. He directs the Master Program on Nano- and Microtechnology at the Swiss Universities of Applied Science. He holds some 40 patents and is co-author of the Surfaces volume of the French Treatise of Material Science, contributor to several other books, author viz. co-author of some 80 papers.