Philip Jennings

Recent research has demonstrated the direct relationship between poverty alleviation and improved access to clean, efficient energy services. Thus, improved access to basic energy services, such as a smokeless stove for cooking/room heating, basic electric indoor lighting, hot water for cooking/drinking/personal hygiene, have been recognized as a central part of an holistic community development (HCD) program. My experience of working with remote, impoverished high altitude mountain communities in Nepal since 1996 shows, that 80-85% of the local village communities identify the same four needs they wish to address: a pit latrine for improved hygiene/health, a smokeless stove inside the house for cooking/room heating/hot water, basic electric indoor lighting and access to clean drinking water. Thus I have developed the “Family of 4” HCD concept which includes projects, implemented in parallel, for each family of a village, addressing all four of these needs. Once the “Family of 4” projects are in place, and their impact and benefits are experienced, the local people start to recognize additional needs. Therefore, I created the “Family of 4 PLUS” HCD concept with thus far eight additional projects. Both HCD concepts address the millennium development goals (MDGs) directly. In the remote high altitude Nepal Himalayas, where the national grid and drivable roads will probably never go, these concepts have been shown to bring significantly more, longterm benefits than individual projects would have been able to. This is because the multi-faceted needs of the communities are recognised and addressed through a holistic, context-specific, multi-project approach, which produces synergistic benefits. Further, the HCD approach enables communities in such a unique and fragile ecosystem that is threatened by climate change, to adapt and become more resilient by tapping into their locally available renewable energy resources in sustainable, carbon neutral ways.

One of the most powerful techniques available for surface structural analysis is low energy electron diffraction (LEED). It is widely used in materials science research to study surface structure and bonding and the effects of structure on surface processes. However because it requires single crystals and ultrahigh vacuum conditions it has limited value for applied surface analysis, which is often concerned with polycrystalline or amorphous materials. LEED has many similarities to X-ray and neutron diffraction but it is preferred for surface studies because of the short mean free path of low energy electrons in solids.

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has been used to study the nature of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen bonds In a-Si thin films. The samples were prepared by rf sputtering under different deposition conditions to produce hydrogen contents ranging from 15 to 35 at.%. Slightly contaminated samples were found to contain nitrogen and oxygen ranging from 0.0 - 1.5 and 0.0 - 3.0 at.% respectively. Annealing vas performed by heating the samples in a hydrogen atmosphere, usually for 30 minutes, at temperatures ranging from 150 to 550 C. The FTIR spectra, taken for the as-deposited sample and after each annealing step, have been deconvoluted into their component peaks using the simplex algorithm. Our results demonstrate that for a particular type of silicon-hydrogen group, evolution of hydrogen takes place at a lower temperature from the surface and/or the near surface region than from the bulk, On the other hand, oxygen and nitrogen related bonds in the a-Si network change configurations on annealing.