Evaluation Report Publications of the Academy of Finland 1/11

Recommendations
This is an excellent unit that should maintain its strategy and high standard of 
research. The panel encourages the unit to more strongly recruit senior staff members 
from outside ÅA and also from outside Finland.

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85
4.38 Åbo Akademi University, Inorganic Chemistry
Overview
The Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemical Engineering 
is one of the four units that constitute the Process Chemistry Centre of ÅA, a Centre 
of Excellence of the Academy of Finland in 2000–2005 and 2006–2011 (in the second 
period within the framework of “Sustainable Chemistry in Production of Pulp and 
Paper, Fuels and Energy, and Functional Materials”).
In the evaluation period, the unit had an average staff of one professor, about four 
senior researchers and eight postdoctoral researchers, as well as 17 PhD students. The 
unit is supported by three administrative staff members and seven technicians.
Of the annual budget, less than 15 per cent comes from core funding. The 
majority of the external funding comes from Tekes, followed very closely by 
industrial funding. The Academy of Finland and the graduate school programme 
account for some 15 per cent of the total budget of the unit.
Research
Inorganic chemistry includes two main activities: combustion and materials 
chemistry. Finland is well known in the design of large-scale biomass combustion 
units and has some of the leading companies in the field. The classical combustion 
reactors are fluidised beds. Beside the quite complex fluid mechanics, chemical 
kinetics is also quite complex, especially due to the mineral compounds included in 
the different biomaterials to be burned: salts and oxides produced may form a eutectic 
liquid under the prevalent temperature, which may induce severe fouling and 
corrosion. This team aims at including relatively detailed chemical kinetics in the 
CFD codes used to model industrial furnaces. Another part of the work concerns 
biocompatible materials, especially the chemistry and engineering of special kinds of 
glass useful in the regrowth of bone tissue.