Founded in 1990/91 and owned by
physicist Danijel Djurek, AVAC was a typical garage
company carrying out research and was planned to be
completely self-funded. The main task was fundamental
research in physics and dissemination of the research
results on the free market. The profit was completely
reinvested in research and education, and company
activity was conducted under the motto “morning –
marketing; afternoon – research”. Moreover, all that
should be achieved in an underdeveloped country. Such a
courageous enterprise, designed to combine fundamental
research with the market, experienced many difficulties
in the 1990s owing to the homeland war and the
structural turbulences of Croatian society. Despite
these difficulties, several scientific papers were
published, and the company continued with broad
educational activity. Zvonko Medunić finished his PhD,
while Ivan Djurek completed his electrical engineering
graduate and MD degrees, developing ultrasonic equipment
and high-performance amplifiers.
In the next decade, AVAC devoted its activity to the
study of the international standards and physical
properties of control cables applied to high-energy
transmission technology. Study of the resistance of
cable isolation to ozone and ultraviolet radiation is a
specialty of the company that has been verified in the
hard atmospheric corrosion circumstances that exist
notably in South Africa.
The research on nonlinear acoustics and sound
reproduction resulted in two dozen fundamental and
technical papers. The chaotic state and time series
analysis were systematically studied in a loudspeaker,
including the stochastic vibration properties described
by the Navier-Stokes equation.
The turning year was 2010, when the Laboratory for
Nonlinear Dynamics (LAND) was erected in Zlatar Bistrica,
the first of several planned buildings presumed to be
the hard core of the future scientific campus. The
laboratory attracts highly motivated young people and
students receiving scholarships from AVAC, and they are
able to consult many attractive textbooks and titles in
the library.
On the grounds in Kumrovec, plants are started for the
production of industrial nanocomposites (INAKO). AVAC
founded the company Menda nanotehnologije, which is
devoted to investigation of the market and associated
activities.
