The « Journées du Groupe Français de la Céramique et de la Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux » (GFC-SM2M) took place from the 7-8 February 2024 at the Centre Européen de la Céramique in Limoges. The 2 days focussed on “Méthodes avancées au service de la compréhension du comportement de matériaux réfractaires dans le contexte de l’European Green Deal”. The event included  

• three CESAREF Doctoral Candidates presenting their work, 
• the presentation of three European projects – HyInHeat, CESAREF and ReSoURCE 
• multiple presentations by senior CESAREF partners  
• a tour of the IRCER laboratories 
• a visit of the company CERINNOV 
• a visit of the four des Casseaux 

📣 The CESAREF participation in the event comprised of presentations by Amit GOPE, Melina RIBEIRO GOMES and Harikeshava RANGANATHAN who were happy and proud of their contributions to this refractory application conference.  

According to @Amit, it was an incredible time at the Limoges GFC Conference! 🌐 The GFC event has helped him interact with lot of people from refractory background and has created an opportunity to reconnect with the old colleagues.  In addition, the dynamic atmosphere fuelled new collaborations and ideas, which he is keen to apply to his research!  

According to @Hari, it was an eye-opening event, where he got to know different research approaches active in the refractory materials field. The event has introduced him to a number of active research projects that are being carried out on hydrogen processing in steel making and how they will contribute to green steel making. He gained good knowledge and understanding in these aspects through his participation in this event! 

In addition, according to @Milena, it has been a great event to listen to the talks on advanced materials characterization techniques, numerical methods applied to materials, and hydrogen, from the experts from this fields. She was glad to have given a talk on her latest review paper published this year at the Journal of the European Ceramic Society (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeurceramsoc.2023.10.044).  She was very happy to meet other researchers who are working on the hydrogen topic and to exchange with them. 

Lastly, @Andrea, @Mathilda and @Kwasi also benefitted from this event as participants. 

We thank the organisers for arranging the IRCER Laboratory visit and a visit to the CERINNOV company. It was exciting for the CESAREF PhDs to get to know about different printing technologies that were in use for making the ceramic products look beautiful! We are also thankful to four des Casseaux for their hospitality and interesting introduction to the history of the ceramics industry in Limoges. 

🔎 The CESAREF team is focused on providing high-quality training materials to students across Europe, the recorded presentations of the GFC event will be available in an online MOOC platform shortly, that is hosted by RWTH Aachen University. So, stay tuned to get good insights about the study contributed to investigate on refractory materials. 

👏 We are proud to see our Doctoral Students contributing again to the discussion of the role of refractories in the context of the European Green Deal. 

The full program of the event can be seen here.