Dr. Matti Laan – Laser cleaning in cultural heritage

Yesterday, on the 7th of May, Associate Professor emeritus of physics Matti Laan gave a highly interdisciplinary lecture about laser cleaning in the field of cultural heritage.

On this project, Dr. Laan (presenting his lecture in the picture on the right) worked with the late Associate Professor emeritus of chemistry Tullio Ilomets. Dr. Laan gave an exciting lecture about different lasers (e.g., Nd:YAG, XeCl, Er:YAG) and which of them is most suitable for laser cleaning of various artefacts (such as paintings or sculptures). For this laser ablation is used, which removes any undesired material (including ageing products and materials from previous conservation works) layer by layer.

Most of the listeners participated via the Zoom platform – over 70 physics, chemists, conservators, material scientists, and people from other disciplines joined in this interdisciplinarity lecture. The lecture was organised by our Cultural Heritage workgroup, Institute of Physics, and The Estonian Academy of Arts in the framework of Dr. Signe Vahur’s PRG1198. The recording (in Estonian) can be found here.

Webinar “Mobile Phase pH in Liquid Chromatography”

On Apr 29, 2021 the webinar “Mobile Phase pH in Liquid Chromatography” took place. Altogether 101 people participated from 41 countries, ranging from Portugal to Philippines and from Peru to Nepal.

It is well known that in liquid chromatography, mobile phase pH is an important parameter, significantly affecting the retention of acidic and basic analytes. Yet, mobile phase pH is tricky to measure because mobile phases are usually aqueous-organic mixtures and in the case of gradient elution mobile phase composition gradually changes during elution. The topics covered during the webinar were:

— Different possibilities to express pH in liquid chromatography (LC)
— Unified pH (pHabs): the concept and measurements methods
— The applications and limitations of different pH expressions in LC

Numerous questions were asked by the participants that indicated the importance of the topic and the need for a more robust conceptual framework for handling the topic of pH in liquid chromatography. Contributing to this, via the pHabs concept, is one of the aims of the UnipHied project.

The webinar was organized in the framework of the PRG690 project from the Estonian Research Council and the  UnipHied project (www.uniphied.eu), which  is funded from the EU’s EMPIR programme, co-financed by the Participating States and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Additional support from: EU Regional Development Fund (TK141 “Advanced materials and high-technology devices for energy recuperation systems”) and Estonian Center of Analytical Chemistry (www.akki.ee)