Konstantinos Sotiriadis', Eng., Ph.D. paper Simulation of Thaumasite Sulfate Attack on Portland Cement Mixtures Using Synthesized Cement Phases is, according to the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), of such a high scientific quality that it is featured as an Editor's Choice in the Februry issue. Dr. Sotiriadis works in the Department of Materials Research at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and he wrote the article together with Radosław Mróz, Eng., Ph.D. from the Faculty of material Sciences and Ceramics from AGH University of Sciences and Technologies in Krakow. After a registration it is possible to read the article for free until the end of the month.

Based on internationally recognized practise, the ITAM director, Assoc. Prof. Stanislav Pospíšil, Ph.D., recommends to use of the following criteria for authorship of scientific articles.

On 8th January 2019 Prof. Ing. Ladislav Fryba, DrSc, an internationally reputed expert in the Dynamics of Structures, a long-time chairman of the Czech Society for Mechanics and employee of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, an outstanding scientist, but above all, a man of warm heart, left us forever. With his passing, the world of science and society as a whole suffered an irretrievable loss.

A Newsletter of the project ProteCHt2save has been published. It is the second newsletter of the Interreg Central Europe Project.

Links:

CZ version

EN version

About ProteCHt2save project

Web page of the project

Autumn Newsletter 2/2018 of the CET/ITAM has been published. Read it here.

You can also subscribe here.

Andrija Buljac, whose Ph.D. research has been conducted jointly with ITAM (namely with Prof. Stanislav Pospíšil and Prof. Sergey Kuznetsov) was awarded with the AMAC UK yearly award for young scientists. He is a research assistant at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The award is given by the Association of Alumni and Friends of Croatian Universities in the United Kingdom for a research stay in the United Kingdom. The award will fund his research stay at the Newcastle University as a part of the Wind and Sea Loads on Energy Structures (WESLO) project funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (Prof. Hrvoje Kozmar).

Dr. Gerardo Presíbtero will give a lecture on Bone fatigue fracture prevention by analysis of microdamage with TORATOM. It will take place on the 14th November, 2018 at 2 p.m. in the meeting room of Centre of Excellence Telč. Presbítero currently works in Laboratory of X-ray Tomography as part of the project Competitiveness Boost of the Centre of Excellence in Vysočina Region.

Lecture Basic concepts of solid-state NMR spectroscopy will be given by Dr. Tomaž Čendak on 24th October, 2018 at 10 AM, Telč, CET seminar room.

The next regular seminar of ITAM is going to be held on  Wednesday 26th of September at 10 AM in Prague. Programme:

10.00: dr. Leopoldo Ruíz-Huerta (head of the National laboratory of additive and digital manufacturing in Mexico)  Design for Additive Manufacturing.

10.50: Matea Ban (Technical University Wien)  Preservation of Architecture: Results from the European Nano-Cathedral Project.

The Jubilee 50th International Chemistry Olympiad, IChO took place in Prague and Bratislava from the 19th to the 29th of July, 2018. More than 300 talented students from 76 countries participated. As part of a daylong excursion they visited the open-air museum at Solvay’s Quarry where Dr. Válek and his team gave a presentation on the history and evolution of lime production. The young chemists learned about limestone, the raw material used in the production of quicklime, about its extraction and processing, the history of the industry, and the development of various types of inorganic binding agents. Contemporary research was covered as well, including the project our team from UTAM is currently working on. As part of the lectures there were practical demonstrations on lime slaking, stirring and application. The young Olympians were captivated by the experiments, and often eagerly asked numerous questions. The presentations for each group usually ended in lively discussions. For most of these young chemists this was the first time encountering a practical demonstration in the processing of quicklime. And thus the lectures and the program gave them insight into a craft that utilizes chemical processes they normally only study on a theoretical level.

In the second half of 1990s, an increased attention was paid to the safeguarding of the built heritage and its integration into the life of contemporary society. The complexity of problems of cultural heritage called for modern interdisciplinary approach and this was started in a systematic way in 1995 by founding of a new department of the Institute - the Associated Research Centre for Historic Structures and Sites (ARCHISS) - joining together researchers from two institutes of the Academy of Sciences. The process continued, because of success in grant project competitions and now there are scientists involved in the research from other institutes and universities and two operating research units - one in Prague and one in another World Heritage City of Telč.

Patrimonia is a research program for young people, which enables them to participate in a process of preservation of cultural heritage, to try in practise a scientific research in cooperation with experts and to find out interesting facts and links in their neighbourhoods. Another aim of the project is to document and safeguard our minor cultural heritage - i.e. vanishing family heritage (letters, diaries), oral testimonies, old routes etc. Patrimonia puts to use the potential of school and other groups of young people using the modern information technologies in the course of the collection of the data, thus potentially creating a basis for a digital atlas of cultural heritage.

MONDIS (MONument Damage Information System) is a research project run by the Department of Cybernetics in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the Czech Academy of Sciences. The main project objectives include the integration of existing knowledge and expertise from the field of cultural heritage protection, including the enhancement of cooperation and exchange of experience. The MONDIS project aims to support professionals addressing the structural and technical conditions of heritage buildings and working on designing appropriate measures or structural interventions. This is done using a knowledge base intended for documentation and analysis of the defects and damages in heritage buildings.

Designed as a closed circuit with controlled wind velocity and temperature conditions. It consists of climatic and aerodynamic parts. While the aerodynamic part provides well-fitted conditions to study wind effects on scaled model of prototypes, an equipment of the climatic part is suited for investigation of influences of weather including the wind, temperature, rain and heat radiation. Using the cooling/heating exchanger, cycle temperature changing of the airflow is available in the whole tunnel within the range of -10 to 30 C in relatively short time period. Integral part of the tunnel equipment consists of instruments for airflow diagnostic, data acquisition system, direct pressure surface measurement, precise thermometry and of many other types of handy accessories for instant use. Workshops for manufacturing of testing models are available in the same building.

The website deals with historical production of burnt lime and related lime technologies, traditional craftsmanship of prossesing and utilization of lime in construction. The main objective is a thourough and complex knowledge of the above, a material-based research and a reconstruction of historical procedures. A common goal is to bring attention to the unique historical techniques, which used to be succesfully employed in the past, nowadays, however, are for the main part forgotten. The website is concieved as an open one, striving to gradually add new related information researched by a wide range of experts on archeology, construction materials, history of construction etc.