On occasion of the AFCAT-GEFTA-STK Symposium, held in Mulhouse (France), Erwin Kaisersberger is honoured with the NETZSCH - GEFTA Award 2008. The prize acknowledges outstanding scientific and applicational work in the field of thermal analysis and calorimetry.
By attributing this scientific award to Erwin Kaisersberger, the German Association for Thermal Analysis (GEFTA) appreciates 35 years of professional activity dedicated to development and testing, to application and improvement of thermoanalytical and calorimetric measuring methods. For more than 15 years, starting in the seventies, his interest was directed to the development of various modes of combining or coupling of Evolved Gas Analysis devices to the conventional equipment of Simultaneous Thermal Analysis especially for the high-temperature range.
A very fruitful period of cooperation began in the late seventies which joined the instrumentation manufacturer with research groups from university institutes and industrial research centers. Primarily the groups of Professor Odoj at Jülich and Professor Antonius Kettrup at Paderborn, later Munich, have to be mentioned here. These two groups and their cooperation with Netzsch Gerätebau represent this considerable technical progress which has been achieved by developing the capillary coupled system and afterwards transforming it to a so-called directly coupled system, i.e. orifice or Skimmer systems.
Numerous scientific publications and presentations at national and international congresses dealing with the instrumentation design, with testing and improving the analytical potential of the TA-MS coupling methods appeared since 1975 and were authored or co-authored by Erwin Kaisersberger. Later on, he published on the thermal properties of special ceramics, among them ceramic high-temperature superconductors, of rubber and plastics, of pharmaceutical substances and in the nineties about solid oxide fuel cells and nanomaterials.
For the scientific and technical reputation of Erwin Kaisersberger these years were of an extraordinary and sustainable importance. He got widely known in the thermoanalytical community as an experienced specialist for all items of gas analysis, high-temperature physics and thermal analysis, for radiation phenomena and - as an well-educated physicist - for precision and reliability. The broad scientific and technical expertise of Erwin Kaisersberger in all the mentioned fields, being related to thermal analysis, fully justify the honour to be decorated with the NETZSCH-GEFTA Award 2008.
Erwin Kaisersberger obtained his academic formation from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich where he finished Experimental Physics with a Diploma in 1973. The same year he joined NETZSCH Gerätebau and was engaged as in the customer's consulting and support as in the technical application laboratory. Over ten years, from 1979 to 1989, he directed the Application Laboratory of NETZSCH Gerätebau.
In the 90th he changed to the technical sales service, was head of the European sales division and participated later in the Sales and Applications Support, a special division of the NETZSCH company designed for their global activities in instrumentation and scientific consulting. Formally he retired in autumn 2007, but he is continuing to act as scientific and technical consultant for the NETZSCH group.
Apart from his scientific work, Erwin Kaisersberger is also very busy in the organizational scientific field: he took part in the organization of national and international congresses and of numerous user meetings, gave lectures on congresses, meetings, autumn schools held by scientific organisations, was a member of the GEFTA board for several years, and took part in the work of standardization groups both on a national and international level.
The board of the German Association for Thermal Analysis congratulates Erwin Kaisersberger on the honour of obtaining the NETZSCH-GEFTA Award and wishes him and his family health and happiness as well as much success for all his personal and scientific activities.
On behalf of the GEFTA Board
Michael Feist
GEFTA chairman
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GEFTA - Gesellschaft für Thermische Analyse e. V.