On Oct 14, 2015 Tallinn University of Technology and University of Tartu jointly organized the first cooperation festival “Right time, right place” (“Õigel ajal õiges kohas”), venue: Mektory innovation centre, Tallinn).
The festival aimed first of all at intensifying collaboration between Estonian industry and academia, but also between different research teams of the two universities. The interest in the event was so large that at some point pre-registration was stopped because of too many participants. The participant number who eventually participated in the event reached 430.
The analytical chemistry research group of UT was also present at the festival and promoted the ECAC distributed interdisciplinary research infrastructure. ECAC unites the competence and analytical capabilities of three prominent organizations in Estonia: University of Tartu, Tallinn University of Technology and the Estonian Environmental Research Centre and offers access to analytical instruments as well as services and collaboration both to academia and industry. Ivo Leito made a presentation about the analytical possibilities of ECAC that can be of interest to the Industry: Analüütilise Keemia Kvaliteedi Infrastruktuur (AKKI) (in Estonian).
In addition, we demonstrated our FT-IR analysis capability and had a fully operational ATR-FT-IR instrument with us (image on the right), enabling any interested person to run material analysis of either the samples that we brought with us or almost anything that could be found on site. People were very interested in the analysis of wood coatings, different polymers and also of their own clothes (e.g. for determining whether a necktie is made of silk or polyester) and research fellow Signe Vahur – our main FT-IR expert – was busy all the day to record and interpret spectra and give explanations to interested people.
This possibility of instant ATR-FT-IR analysis proved to be the most popular topic in the Chemistry thematic room of the festival and attracted much attention from people with very different backgrounds. This is not surprising – this instrumental method has been in the core of a number of research collaboration projects with industry in the past and is expected to be so also in the future.
EACH and AMS students strongly benefit from the expertise and instrumentation that has been accumulated by ECAC (AKKI). Several of the EACH/AMS teachers are directly involved in ECAC and a number of ECAC’s instruments are used in teaching and thesis work.