UMK NEWSLETTER 02/08

Professor Tapani Vuorinen, Head of the Department of Forest Products Technology, is the new Chairman of the UMK Center for New Materials Board. He succeeds Professor Simo-Pekka Hannula´s, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, three-year period.

Professor Tapani Vuorinen is a TKK alumnus. He defended his thesis in 1988 and after that he took a Post Doc position in the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. After this period Tapani Vuorinen returned to TKK to a position of a senior researcher at the Department of Forest Products Technology and in 1996 he was nominated for a Professor at the Department. The Department of Forest Products Technology at TKK is the only university in Finland offering teaching and research on all areas of forest products technology, i.e. from processing of wood to forest and construction materials, printed paper and veneer even to fibers in nano scale.

In 2003 the Marcus Wallenberg Award was granted to researchers who had made an innovation for promoting the environmental safety and cost efficiency in processing cellulose. Tapani Vuorinen was one of the four member team of researchers, who discovered how to remove the hexenuronic acid from the cellulose mass before the whitening process. By using this application the forest industry gain cost savings and can reduce environmental disadvantages by decreasing the need of chemicals in the whitening process.

In spite of his calm appearance, Tapani Vuorinen holds many assignments. In addition to his leadership of the Department, he holds also the position of Vice Dean for Faculty of Chemistry and Materials Sciences. He has his own research group of about 15 researchers to lead and he also teaches new forest experts. He is the TKK representative for the Forest Cluster Ltd, one of the Strategic Centers of Excellence in Finland and the Chairman of the Quality Control System Group at TKK, and he still has energy to promote and work for UMK as the Chair of the Board.

Tapani Vuorinen crystallizes the current stage of the Finnish Forest Cluster as follows:  “Despite of the global competition, the Finnish Forest Cluster is still in the world class. In the selling of customer solutions of forest industry, Finland is absolutely number one in the world. The new forest product producers from Asia and South America have changed the market balance, and the price competition requires the Finnish forest industry to change their production lines from printed paper to packing solutions.”

What is the role for UMK in the future?


Contact information:
Professor Tapani Vuorinen
Department of Forest Products Technology, TKK
+358 9 451 4236
Tapani.vuorinen@tkk.fi
http://puu.tkk.fi/en/department/

I had recently the opportunity to participate in a workshop on material efficiency from a life cycle point of view. The workshop was arranged by TEKES as a part of the Functional materials program. To bring up the need for recycling aspects due to decreasing natural resources, higher energy prices and environmental issues was a great idea.

Increasing functionality will still in the future be important in the development of new materials. However, life cycle economics will enhance the significance of scrap value. Can prestigious metals be recycled in an energy efficient manner? Are there environmental issues during the life cycle?

New solutions are driven by rational, economic facts. Good enterprises are likely to take advantage of the changes in the business environment. This requires a strategy for years to come.

Academic research at technical universities, like TKK, is driven by new findings in science and technology. Very often these include more functionality and complexity. In the future there is also a need for new materials research aiming at energy efficient recycling processes and cheaper substitutes. For many of us this implies a new type of mind set.

This issue of the UMK Newsletter is devoted to the Nanopoli building and the Nano Microscopy Center. I am very glad we have been able to concentrate some of the most successful research groups at TKK and the UMK Center of New Materials, including the Low temperature laboratory and the Nanomaterials group, within the same building. I am sure you will hear more from these folks in the future.

The UMK Center of New Materials is a cross-disciplinary center independent of faculty and department boarders. In this role, and to justify its raison d'être, the UMK Center of New Materials has to fulfill needs that are not addressed by the traditional, vertical university structure. To encourage good young scientists to get interested in applications and possibly in commercialization is such a need. I am both glad and proud that the UMK Center of New Materials has had a key role in initiating and organizing both the “New materials, applications and commercialization” and “Commercialization and applications of nanotechnology” modules for selected postgraduate students, and the new Materials Technology Invention Award. This Award will be granted at "Tekniikan päivät 2009" on January 15th.

Matti Tomi is working as a research assistant at TKK's Low Temperature Laboratory. Along with wrapping up his M.Sc. studies at TKK he's doing research on the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes and graphene. His current work on the characterization of graphene sheets will also lay the foundation for an upcoming diploma thesis on low-temperature high-frequency measurements on graphene. "In the past we have carried out transport and noise measurements on graphene samples obtained from collaborators at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. More recently, we have put more weight on optimizing our own sample manufacturing procedures to provide for more sophisticated and complex experiments."

The Nano group of the Low Temperature Laboratory (LTL) consists of some 15 scientists investigating quantum phenomena in nanostructures such as Josephson junctions, carbon nanotubes and graphene. Thanks to the long-running experience in cryoengineering at LTL, most experiments can be carried out at temperatures ranging from that of liquid helium (4 K at 1 atm) down to the millikelvin temperatures of dilution cryostats. In graphene-related research LTL operates in collaboration with several TKK laboratories and Nokia Research Center.

Although practically all the measurements are performed at LTL, in the preparatory work Tomi frequently finds himself moving about in the campus area. "It's often all about finding the right tool for the job. And this is where the cooperation among UMK members really pays off. In addition to our own facilities, within the graphene project we've used the equipment at Micronova, at the Forest Products Chemistry lab and at the Laboratory of Physics, all within a walking distance."

After decades of being shrugged off as a merely theoretical model, the experimental discovery of graphene in 2004 opened up a whole new research area in materials science and mesoscopic physics. Graphene in its proper form is a strictly two-dimensional material—a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal crystal lattice. As a material graphene has exceptional electronic properties that enable the study of quantum electrodynamical (QED) phenomena and spur suggestions of intriguing applications, such as gas sensors, hydrogen storage, nanoresonators and field-effect transistors. Some more ambitious views even place graphene as the basis of a new type of microelectronics—or nanoelectronics—where a complex circuitry is carved directly on a graphene sheet.

Contact information:
Director, Professor Mikko Paalanen
Low Temperature Laboratory, TKK
Tel: +358 9 451 3057
paalanen@neuro.hut.fi
http://ltl.tkk.fi

Professor Janne Ruokolainen, the director of the new Nanomicroscopy Center curves his motorcycle to the front yard of the new Nanohouse. After he has changed his outfit it is time to take a tour in the Nanomicroscopy Center that started its operation in the last spring.



Together Nanohouse and the Nanomicroscopy Center (NMC) form a complex called Nanopoli. Nanopoli is a part of the national basic research infrastructure as well as Micronova. Together these form the core of the nanoresearch at TKK. Nanopoli houses the researchers from the Low Temperature Laboratory and the nanoresearchers from the Department of Applied Physics and the research areas span from nanomaterials to low temperature physics and from energy to brain research.

Janne Ruokolainen also leads jointly with academy professor Olli Ikkala the research group on molecular materials. This experience combined with his experience from the USA and from other similar facilities has been important when designing the NMC. The people that have been participating in the planning, both the scientific experts as well as the architects, have conducted visits to similar facilities in England and Germany. All this has resulted in excellent facilities and equipment for the advanced nanoresearch.

 - Building the NMC has required the use of special solutions. These are used to exclude the effects of vibrations and magnetic fields in order to generate favorable research environment, says Janne Ruokolainen. Also the temperature, humidity and air flow is constantly monitored from the impressive engine room at the top of the building.

The NMC has three specially equipped rooms that have been isolated by seven meter deep trenches. In addition, the microscopes lie on an eight meters thick layer of concrete. These structures ensure that the external conditions will not interfere with the research. Two of the rooms will be equipped with already ordered microscopes by Jeol. One of the microscopes will be so called sub-Å TEM and the other so called liquid-helium bio-TEM. These instruments will allow the investigation of the features down to 0.1 nm. They will be in operation during the coming year. These microscopes are the only ones the Japanese have delivered to the Nordic Countries and even similar instruments cannot be found in Finland. The third room will be in reserve for future acquisitions. (Click here for more detailed info about the facilities).

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Professor Pertti Hakonen ended up specializing in low temperature physics under the guidance of academy professor Olli V. Lounasmaa and later, from the 90’s, in nanophysics with the inspiration from Professor Mikko Paalanen. Nowadays professor Hakonen leads the Low Temperature Laboratory’s Nanogroup that employs ten researchers. The Nanogroup as well as the Low Temperature Laboratory as whole is known for its world class research.

The Nanogroup investigates fundamental quantum phenomena in nanostructures using low temperature and electronic transport measurements. In both normal and superconducting nanosamples quantum mechanical wave character of the electrons and their Coulomb repulsion lead to new phenomena, which they try to utilize in new sensor/amplifier applications.