ESTWAVE · Educational, Scientific and Technological Aspects of Mesoscopic Continuum Physics for Waves in Complex Materials

Educational, Scientific and Technological Aspects of Mesoscopic Continuum Physics for Waves in Complex Materials

The Reintegration Grant contributed in different ways to the research of Dr. Herrmann: 1) initialization of a 3D visualization lab 2) foster existing and establish new cooperations 3) establishing an infrastructure for remote seminars (bi-directional communication) using open source software 4) founding of ESTsIde journal-like newsletter 5) research on theory of complex micro-structured materials (liquid crystals and fibre reinforced solids) 1) The concept of a 3D visualization system was developed jointly by Dr. Heiko Herrmann and Dr. Ewald Quak and partially funded by their re-integration grants ESTwave and ESTSpline. The aim was to establish a 3D visualization system for scientific data at CENS, which has not existed there before. This system has so far attracted two foreign MSc students who wrote their theses as visiting students in Tallinn and later entered PhD studies at Tallinn University of Technology. The visualization lab also supports the BONUS+ "BalticWay" project that is aimed at using currents for environmental management for the Baltic sea maritime industry. The 3D stereoscopic visualization system is currently being extended into a semi-immersive CAVE-like virtual reality environment. It will be the first system of this kind in Estonia and will greatly help to interpret scientific data and therefor transform data into information. 2) Within the project new contacts to 5 universities and 2 research centres have been established. With several of them a strong collaboration exists now. Especially the research on micro-structured materials has lead to new cooperations in the field of short fibre reinforced materials, with a focus on steel fibre reinforced concrete. This type of concrete is recently becoming of great interest for the construction industry, as it will provide more freedom for the designer and is expected to lower construction costs. 3) Often, traveling scientists are disconnected from the seminars held within their group, this is also a problem for "distant learners". During this project different open source software have been combined to broadcast the slides and audio as well as enabling interactive written or spoken questions. The great advantage of using open source software is, that no license costs or limitations appear and therefore the number of participants is not restricted. Additionally open standards are used for communication, such as the XMPP or SIP protocol, which give the participants a free choice of client software, independent of the operating system. As server software is also available as open source, it is possible to set up an own infrastructure, possibly protected by a virtual private network using encryption. 4) A prominent dissemination activity is the initiation of a journal-like newsletter "ESTsIde" (Estonian Scientific Computing In Detail) by Dr. Herrmann, who is one of the editors. The aim is to inform researchers, students and the interested general public about infrastructure and research projects in scientific computing and high performance computing in Estonia. The newsletter consists of a continuously updated wiki and an annual printed booklet and PDF file. The newsletter adopts the open access philosophy. An information medium like this did not exist in Estonia before, and the idea follows the examples of the Finnish "CSC news" and German "InSiDE". 5) Initially the research focussed on the theory of liquid crystals, with other materials only as side interest. During the project it was discovered, that several methods and concepts of liquid crystal theory can be transferred to short fibre reinforced materials, whose properties depend on the orientation distribution of the short fibres, similarly as properties of liquid crystals depend on the orientation of the molecules. This demonstrates that interdisciplinary research is possible even between seemingly totally different research fields. The representative material was chosen to be steel fibre reinforced concrete, which is of special interest to concrete producing industry in the area. Dr. Heiko Herrmann Centre for Non-linear Studies Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology Akadeemia tee 21 12618 Tallinn -- Estonia

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