Physicist who strove for practical solutions
Andrew Brinkman, who has died aged 60 after a protracted illness, was a multi-talented applied physicist and an early advocate of environmental science. Most of his career was spent at Durham University, where he was a professor, and his work led to significant advances in the manufacture of airport security scanners.
The eldest child of Pentecostal missionaries working in Congo, Andy was educated at a boarding school in Northampton. He was thus a devout believer, and maintained that his thorough science schooling made possible his degree in electrical engineering and a PhD at Nottingham University, where he married his wife, Jeannette.
In 1976 Andy took a position as a lecturer in the University of Ahmadu Bello in northern Nigeria. There he became interested in the Harmattan wind – a dust-bearing seasonal wind that can reduce the temperature to 3C and the visibility to that of a dense fog over large areas. Using local meteorological and sunlight data, Andy developed a mathematical model to explain the effect in terms of light scattering from large dust particles. This was later used by those forecasting the possible impact of a nuclear winter.
At Durham from 1980, he was a very clear teacher, and pursued research that might result in important social benefits. Active in the field of solar photovoltaic energy, he led a number of early thin-film solar cell device projects, became an expert on semiconductor science and produced a book, Physics of the Environment (2008).
Notable among his commercial collaborators was Elmwood Sensors, in the late 1980s and early 90s. Andy guided a team working on thermistors – materials that get hot when they pass a current, but will not pass a current at all when they get too hot. The resulting self-limiting heater pellets found their way into everything from kettles to wing-mirror heaters and warmers for diesel-fuel injectors.
Crystal growth was a lifelong passion of Andy's, and he recognised its significance in underpinning a huge range of science and technology, silicon chips and quartz in timepieces being perhaps the best-known examples.
During the late 1990s he ran an EU-sponsored programme to grow x- and gamma-ray detector crystals from cadmium telluride, and in 2003 started a company of his own, Durham Scientific Crystals Ltd. With operations run by one of Andy's own PhD graduates, the company quickly expanded its interests to include electronics systems and spectrometers with detector crystals at their heart. Now known as Kromek, based in Sedgefield, Co Durham, the company has developed a smart scanner, approved for use in airports, which can identify liquids in bottles without the need to open them. Research into "colour" x-ray imaging offers the prospect of helping with tumour identification.
Andy was awarded a chair in 2009, and the following year Durham recognised his achievement with its first Impact award. Retiring through ill health at the end of 2010, he remained passionate about discovery until the end. He is survived by Jeannette, his children, Catherine and Stephen, a grandchild and his mother.
• Andrew Willis Brinkman, applied physicist, born 25 August 1950; died 7 July 2011
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/28/andrew-brinkman-obituary
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