Page 25 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

Spanish. Dr. Baldwin attended the ASEAN-U.S. Workshop and hosted his own DOE Biomass Cookstoves Technical Meeting in January 2011 in Arlington, VA,34 to initiate a five- year, $12.5M program to address the technical barriers to the development of low emission, high-efficiency cook stoves. Needless to say, having Dr. Baldwin in a senior position with- in the Department of Energy was crucial to their ability to apply the considerable infrastructure of the DOE to this issue. It also appears that the National Science Foundation will be targeting an effort in this area under a recently announced NSF-Wide Investment Area entitled “Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability35” that may rep- resent as much as 15% of the NSF program investments.
As an acoustician, at this point I think I can safely say that Phil, Bill, and I were both making waves and riding waves in cook stove and climate related policymaking.
You have passed this test
This is a rather long article. If you have read all the way
up to this point, you probably have a (latent?) interest in the
application of science and technology to policymaking. The
Jefferson Science Fellows program is small and focuses on a
rather specialized (fairly geriatric) group: tenured senior fac-
ulty. It is not the only way to enter the national policymaking
process. A similar State Department program, called the
Franklin Fellowship Program, is directed toward recruitment
of mid- to upper-level professionals (quasi-geriatric) from
both private-sector and non-profits with a broad range of
backgrounds and experiences, not just scientist and engi-
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The largest and oldest program that brings scientists and engineers into both the legislative and executive branches of the Federal government is the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Program. The AAAS, founded in 1848, is the world’s largest general scientific society and the publisher of the weekly Science magazine, which has the largest paid circu-
I am even aware of one case where one spouse was a Jefferson and the other a Franklin with both spending the year together in Washington, DC.
neers.
lation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. Starting in 1973, the AAAS has sponsored a program that has placed over 2,000 scientists and engineers in tempo-
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bers of females and males.
Unlike the Jefferson and Franklin programs (so far),
many of the AAAS Fellows spend several years in the pro- gram and then remain in government service. After nearly forty years, many of the former AAAS Fellows have reached high levels. Congressman Rush D. Holt, who received a Ph.D. in Physics, got his start in policymaking as AAAS Congressional Fellow (1982-83) serving in the office of Congressman Robert Edgar (D-PA) and was an arms control expert at the State Department before deciding to run for the congressional seat he has held since 1999.
In addition, several professional societies sponsor AAAS Fellows. Among them are the Acoustical Society of America, the American Physical Society,39 and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical &
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Electronic Engineers. Sam Baldwin was an AIP/APS
Congressional Fellow (for Senator Paul Tsongas) the year prior to Rush Holt’s AAAS service and, as mentioned earlier, Bill Behn was an IEEE Policy Fellow.
Epilogue – Maybe acoustics does have something to contribute to cook stoves
Many researchers have demonstrated that fan-assisted enhanced convection can substantially reduce biomass-burn- ing cook stove emissions, reduce fuel consumption, and pro- vide some control over the stoves heating power (known as the “turn-down ratio”).41,42 Today, there are several commer- cially available “fan stoves,” most notably the Philips WoodstoveTM and the First Energy (formerly BP) Oorja,TM that requires processed fuel pellets. Both stoves require electricity
Many of the AAAS Fellows are fresh from graduate school, although there are a significant number of mid-career professionals who enter their program. In 2008, 163 Fellows were brought into the pro- gram with 130 going to the Executive Branch and 33 going to Congress. Their ages ranged from 26 to 66, with equal num-
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rary positions within the Federal government.
Fig. 4. Two prototype proof-of-concept thermoacoustic electrical generators designed to extract a small amount of heat from biomass-burning cook stove to generate elec- tricity in villages that do not have access to electricity. (Left) Development of this prototype was supported by the P. S. Veneklasen Research Foundation (www.veneklasenresearchfoundation.org) and used a ceramic stack in a standing-wave thermoacoustic engine to drive a commercial 4” electrodynamic speaker using air at
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atmospheric pressure and electromagnetic radiation to transport heat from the stove to the hot-end of the stack.
acoustic engine constructed by Aster, in the Netherlands uses four regenerators and 8 heat exchangers to convert heat of a stove into electricity. This one is designed to pro- duce 50 watts of electric power. The Fuels from Agriculture in Communal Technology (FACT) Foundation is supporting this effort (www.fact-foundation.com)
(Right). A more sophisticated traveling wave thermo-
Cook Stoves and Climate Change 21