Social project at Quixeramobim - Ceará
Located at 203 km from Fortaleza, the capital city of Ceará state, Quixeramobim has approximately 60 thousand inhabitants. As it happens in many regions of Brazil’s Northeast, Quixeramobim county faces many infra-structure problems, in special in the electric energy sector. This problem is more evident in the region’s most isolated communities. Studies prove that the electricity supply for isolated communities, through the conventional electric grid systems or descentralized diesel oil generation, proves unfeasible due to the high costs involved. For this reason the search for an alternate energy generation solution is necessary. During the implementation of the project, studies on the behavior of engine generators powered by in natura vegetal oil of other oleaginous besides mamona (castor-oil plant), and also by biodiesel through the transesterification process were conducted. In regions more affected by energy problems, the benefit of these studies is the obtention of quality electric energy through renewable sources. The project went beyond and searched to replicate the process in isolated communities, where the arrival of conventional electric energy or its generation are excessively expensive. So, with the building of an electric energy generation system, each community will be able to obtain its own electric energy, produced by generator engines that use oil of an oleaginous grown locally as fuel. Each system conceived is developed through community participative planning, being the management their responsability. In order to avoid excessive energy consumption and concurrently increase the quantity of jobs and income, a manual peeling machine was created, so as to provide more efficiency to this process.
