MY Camper Jarkko Etula: Exchanging views of passion
Selected out of hundreds of applicants to the final group of 30 talented young people, 19-year-old Jarkko Etula considers the Millennium Youth Camp an extraordinary, once in a lifetime opportunity.
Jarkko Etula lives in Kuopio, a city in Eastern Finland with approximately 92 000 inhabitants.
During the MY Camp there will be lectures, workshops, meetings with top Finnish scientists, teamwork, visits to the cooperation organizations and also some leisure. Jarkko Etula looks forward to meeting many new and interesting people as well as to finding out more about the new technologies.
“The Millennium Youth Camp offers a chance to interconnect with like-minded people who are fond of science from all around the world. It is especially a chance to exchange passionate views in order to improve the standard of living without compromising sustainable development.”
Jarkko’s application project was a plan to refine the process of producing hydrogen using bacteria in microbial electrolysis cells. In microbial electrolysis cells organic matter, such as biomass and wastewater, is converted to hydrogen. However, the cell requires a small jolt of electricity and in his plan Jarkko evaluated the use an organic dye-sensitized solar cell as an ecological and inexpensive power source for microbial electrolysis. He describes coming up with a plan as a sum of various coincidences.
“I arrived at this plan after reading an article by Greg Smestad who illustrated the use of a dye-sensitized solar cell in university level demonstrations. Dye-sensitized solar cells have been used to pioneer a robust and ecological power source, which can be easily applied to various platforms and then optimized to perform the task that is required. In my project plan, this task was to provide a simple and inexpensive pathway for the production of hydrogen from organic feedstock. This process is applicable to e.g. wastewater treatment plants that offer a variety of novel advantages in order to reduce the costs of sewage processing.”
Apart from physical chemistry and biology, Etula is interested in wide variety of things
“I have a passion for audio-visual engineering in concerts and DJ-gigs. I compose and produce ambient techno music from scratch, and I also own a saxophone, which I nowadays only play to record samples for ambient music. Given the possibility of some free time, I go snowboarding with my friends,” he says. He also studies Krav Maga self defense system.
Link: Millennium Youth Camp
Document: Jarkko’s plan for MYCamp (pdf)
Ella Airas is a journalist working for The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE and MyScience, among others. When she is not working she likes to spend her time in the nature and to photograph it. Travelling and documentary films are her passions.