On Friday, 14th February 2025, we had a pleasure to host Dr. Anton Chyrkin from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who delivered a seminar within the Advanced Materials Centre meetings.
Dr. Chyrkin is a leading scientist in the field of high-temperature corrosion of alloys. He delivered a talk: “Breakaway Oxidation of Ferritic Stainless Steels in Low pO2 Humid Gases: The Role of Cr-Depletion Austenitization“.
It has been a great pleasure to host Anton in Gdańsk!
We had a pleasure of hosting Muhammad Saleem Akhtar, PhD student from Warsaw University of Technology (supervisor: Prof. Tomasz Wejrzanowski).
Saleem spent two weeks (3.02-14.02) in Gdańsk. He has been learning and carrying out measurements of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) on electrodes prepared at WUT.
On 12th February I attended PhD defense at DTU Energy of Miao Yu. The thesis topic was “Intermediate-Temperature Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cells“.
I had a pleasure to be a co-supervisor of Miao Yu, with the main supervisor Professor Ming Chen from DTU Energy. Miao performed very well, her experiments are really impressive and wish her all the best in career!
As I spent quite some time at DTU Energy, this has been a great experience. I have been partly involved in the high-temperature corrosion part of the thesis. Miao has also spent few months at Gdańsk, we worked together on development of protective coatings for steel interconnects.
On Thursday, 21st November we have enjoyed a presentation by a guest PhD student Mohamed Ahmed Baba from Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania, entitled: “Laser-induced micro/nanostructure of functional materials”.
Mohamed is a specialist in laser processing of materials, particularly in femto-second laser applications. These lasers offer very interesting possibilities to modify materials with limited redeposition/melting of the samples. We have already applied the laser modification to solid oxide cells and dense and porous steels. He has been visiting Politechnika Gdańska for a week to carry out joint measurements and characterization on laser-processed Crofer 22 APU steel.
We have been working together through a joint Lithuanian-Polish research project within the NCN Narodowe Centrum Nauki Daina 2 project: “Porous metal supported micro-scale solid oxide fuel cells: fundamentals, fabrication and testing”.
On Thursday, 14th November we had a final meeting with Md Sohanur Rahman, who visited us for 3 months within the Erasmus+ exchange programme from TU Chemnitz.
Mr. Rahman worked on galvanic deposition of electrodes for alkaline electrolysis. Based on the Raney 2.0 composition, we tried to deposit the coatings on different substrates varying the deposition conditions.
I had a pleasure to be one of the reviewers of the doctoral dissertation of Mr. Keyun Li, MSc at Faculty of Energy and Fuels, supervisor prof. Konrad Świerczek.
The defence took place on 17th October 2024 at AGH University, Faculty of Energy and Fuels at 12.00.
The PhD thesis “Functional oxygen electrodes for Solid Oxide Cells based on Cu-containing perovskite-type oxides” presents a great overview and development of oxygen electrode materials based on or containing copper.
I very much enjoyed the high quality thesis. Prof. Świerczek’s group has been working on materials physico-chemistry for many years and have developed an impressive array of characterization methods which is a pleasure to follow.
The PhD thesis and all reviews can be downloaded from: