Search

Environmental concerns involving the dairy industry are shifting from an exclusive focus on water quality to encompass climate change and air quality issues. The dairy industry's climate change air emissions of concern are the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. With regard to air quality, the dairy industry's major emission contributions are particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and ammonia. The emissions of these compounds from dairies can be variable because of a number of factors including weather conditions, animal type, management, and nutrition. To evaluate and compare emissions across the diverse operations that comprise the US dairy industry, emissions should be reported per unit of output (e.g., per kg of 3.5% fatcorrected milk). Accurately modeling emissions with models that can predict the complex bio-geochemical processes responsible for emissions is critical to assess current emissions inventories and develop mitigation strategies. Improving the dairy industry's production efficiency (e.g., improvements in management, nutrition, reproduction, and cow comfort) is an effective way to reduce emissions per unit of milk. With accurate process-based models, emissions reductions due to improved production efficiency could be reported per unit of milk and predicted on a farm-to-farm basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A new plasma induced damage mechanism on CMOS image sensor is analyzed. An increase of the mean pixel dark current is observed after the plasma etch of a cavity on the pixel area. The degradation increases non-linearly when the dielectric layers between the photodiode and the plasma become thinner. This can be explained by a photo generation phenomenon in the dielectric nitride layer, induced by the plasma UV, and assisted by the wafer surface charge. This mechanism leads to the creation of a positive fixed charge on the pixel surface, which can next deplete the top P layer of the pinned photodiode. The temperature dependence of the dark current again demonstrates that the degradation is mainly due to a diode surface generation effect. Process and pixel architecture optimization are finally proposed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]