During the past year Vahanen’s specialists from various disciplines have been strongly present at top-level international seminars. – This year we decided to test what kind of reception our expertise would have in researcher seminars outside of Finland’s borders, says Pekka Laamanen, Business Area Director from Vahanen Specialist Services. – In international forums attention was especially drawn to the presentation by Katariina Laine, where she discussed the Finnish groundbreaking work in airtightness improvements of structures and its quality assurance methods during indoor air renovation projects, Laamanen continues.
In march 2014 Juha Komonen and Hannu Pyy participated in the 8th International Colloquium Industrial Floors 2014 conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The presentation by Komonen concentrated on successful coating of concrete floors and Finnish quality assurance methods. – Participating in this conference is already a tradition at Vahanen, as our respected Senior Advisor Vilho Pekkala has taken part to all the previous industrial floors conferences. This year he wanted to pass on the baton to the next generation, Komonen says.
Klaus Viljanen and Pauli Sekki participated in the international building physics conference 10th Nordic Symposium on Building Physics, held in Lund, Sweden in June 2014. The conference, organized once in three years, is the largest international conference concentrated on building physics. Viljanen exhibited in the conference the findings of his 2012 completed dissertation, which dealt with the ventilation of PVC roofs. – The findings supported the views of the Finnish Roofing Association which state that Finland needs to move towards the practice where PVC roofs are executed as groove ventilated similarly as other so called compact roofs, Viljanen concludes.
Katariina Laine and Eero Salo took part in 35th AIVC, 4th TightVent, 2nd Venticool Conference in September 2014 in Poznan, Poland. The conference concentrated on airtightness, ventilation systems and indoor air quality. Laine’s presentation covered the improving of airtightness in indoor air renovation projects. – Outside of Finland airtightness is mainly associated with reducing energy consumption and building passive houses. Improving the airtightness in order to improve the quality of indoor air was a new thing for the audience but the overall reception was good and the topic stimulated enthusiastic conversation, Laine says.
Miia Pitkäranta participated in Indoor Air 2014 conference in Hong Kong in July 2014, which is the main conference of international indoor air association ISIAQ and the largest international conference within the field. The six-day conference’s over 900 presentations dealt with a wide variety of themes related to indoor air and ventilation. – A rising theme was the need for adding conversation and cooperation between academic researchers and operators in the field, such as condition controllers and renovation designers, Pitkäranta states. Within this field Pitkäranta, who also has her background in academic research, is an active member in the recently founded ISIAQ’s microbiology field’s scientific and technological control group (STC). Also the American Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has taken interest in the Finnish moisture damage research and indoor air know-how. As part of the Built Environment Microbiology research program funded by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Pitkäranta was invited in September to a seminar in UC Berkeley in California, where the future prospects of the field were discussed.
Vahanen represented Finnish expertise in Comsol News 2014 magazine. The magazine covered articles from various international organizations such as Boeing, Boston Scientific, SNS Concast and NASA. Pauli Sekki from Vahanen Group introduced the utilization of BIM modeling in analyzing frost risk in renovation projects in his article Using multiphysics simulation to prevent building damage. The article can be read from http://comsol.fi/c/17aj
– We can offer our clients for example heat bridge analysis, calculation of U-values for complex structures (2D and 3D), time dependent heat and moisture technical assessments and modeling for fluid dynamics, says Sekki, who operates as the Product Manager for building physical modeling at Vahanen.
– We will be present in international forums also in 2015, as our presentations this year evoked genuine and positive interest towards our expertise. We also get to learn things in the seminar trips that we can adapt and utilize in our own projects, concludes Laamanen.