Swanson School of Engineering

Our visit to Sao Leopoldo allowed us to experience clean energy infrastructure in Brazil and compare this to energy infrastructure in the United States, understand the unique challenges the Brazilian electric grid faces, and learn about domestic innovation. Throughout our time in Sao Leopoldo, we stayed in the Work+Hotel which was a very quaint and cozy hotel right off the main road; Unisinos and HT Micron were conveniently located right across the street from the hotel. Despite being a smaller hotel, I felt that the breakfast at the Work+Hotel was the best out of all the places we stayed in Brazil. Our first excursion was taking a tour of Porto Alegre, a larger city to the south of Sao Leopoldo. We got to see various sites throughout the city and learned about the history of both Porto Alegre and the state, Rio Grande do Sul. The next day we went to Certaja, a local cooperative utility, and learned about how they handle power distribution within Rio Grande do Sul. The day after that we toured CPFL RGE which is a much larger utility, akin to Duquesne Light Company or PPL here in Pennsylvania. This allowed us to compare and contrast the operations of a smaller cooperative utility with a larger, more traditional utility. We also visited HT Micron, a Korean semiconductor company that has a Brazilian subsidiary. We learned about the semiconductor manufacturing process and about how semiconductor manufacturing is accomplished in Brazil. Although the most complex aspects of semiconductor manufacturing involving the extreme ultraviolet photolithography process are not yet completed in Brazil, the final packaging and testing of semiconductors, which is a very complex and intricate process in its own right, is done in Brazilian facilities. After the visit to the semiconductor company, we got to participate in Capoeira, a traditional Afro-Brazilian martial art. It was a mixture of music and martial arts and it heavily emphasized being coordinated with your opponent. In our final days in Sao Leopoldo, we visited Higra, a company that manufactures submersible pumps and small hydroelectric generators. We toured the production facility and learned about their advanced pump technologies.