Prof. Christoph Schick from the Universität Rostock, Germany, and now a scholar of the CAS Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists in China, visited DNL (Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy) on 30th of August. A friendly reception for Prof. Schick was given by Prof. Ping Chen, Head of the DNL Hydrogen Energy and Advance Materials Department, Prof. Lixian Sun and other DNL scientists. Fruitful academic exchange and discussion were carried out.

Prof. Schick was invited to present an interesting lecture titled "Calorimetry on Time Scales from Microseconds to Days", and the lecture was moderated by Prof. Lixian Sun. In his lecture, Prof. Schick introduced their fast DSC instrument in terms of design principle, functions and applications in great details. Controllable heating-up or cooling-down can be accomplished by this instrument, so that a fast heating-up speed of 500 K/s or a slow speed of 1 K/day for the measurement of thermodynamic properties (such as heat capacity and enthalpy) can be offered. This instrument thus provided a new means for the research of the formation and evolution of metastable states, as well as for measuring properties of materials under ultra-fast thermal treatment conditions. Owning to its extremely low additional heat capacity and high sensitivity, studies on samples of nano-gram scale are feasible. The fast DSC instrument can be applied to thermodynamic analysis, such as nucleation processes and phase change dynamics for polymers, metals, alloys and inorganic salts, as well as in the study of thermal properties of thin films with thickness of several nanometers. By illustrating the application of the instrument for the study of thermal properties of polymers and alloys, Prof. Schick explained the functions of the instrument under various measuring modes.

After the lecture，discussion was carried out between Prof. Schick and DNL scientists. He also expected that a good collaboration with Prof. Lixian Sun’s group can be initiated.