I am happy to announce that our improved website “Combustion Trends for the Future” has been launched. I invite you to benefit from this continuing service.

Prof. Hartmut Spliethoff
Deputy Superindendent of Research

“Combustion Trends for the Future” is a service to identify and verify the technical information needs of IFRF Member Organisations and to define technical goals for the Member’s research projects.

We want to stimulate the discussion by organising “Topical Orientated Technical Meetings” where invited members from industry and research present the state of the art in a specific subject relevant to our members and discuss the needs for new information for the future, backed up by surveys based on questionnaires.

Today we are launching the website by:

• Republishing the results of the background planning project for the present triennial (January 2002) and publishing;
• The full report of TOTeM19 “Combustion Oscillation and Hum – Problems and Opportunities” (May 2002 – Chairman: Neil Fricker), including presentations, summaries and detailed conclusions.

To read these reports, go to http://www.trend.ifrf.net.

The report on TOTeM20 (CFD for Combustion Engineering) will follow soon after. Progress on the Linkebeek Cluster, including TOTeM21 (Combustion Trends for Cement and Mineral Processing) and TOTeM22 (Combustion Trends for Power Generation Industries) will follow.

Editors Note:

As in the past, with our TOTeM reports, we continue to publish each invited presentation as downloadable pdf files. In addition we publish html summaries of each presentation, of the discussion sessions, and the detailed conclusions.

The improved site is fully databased. It is our objective to develop this site into a fully searchable and interactive site.

All presentations and session reports will be fully databased and key-worded, allowing the addition of a technical keyword/author’s name based Search Engine. This addition will clearly improve the possibility of the reader to retrieve information on different technical topics from the database, particularly where more and more reports are added. The search engine will be added prior to the publication of the TOTeM20 report.

The next step will relate to interactivity – two parallel activities will be pursued:

• The introduction of email based technical surveys, backed up with;
• A new, single, moderated forum module for the use of IFRF Individual Members, to cover all of the four major Members Sites – the Member Expertise Exchange, the Online Handbook, Members’ Research Projects – and of course Combustion Trends for the Future.

Meanwhile if you are wondering where you can find the reports on TOTeM12 through to MC13 – go to the Archive at:

 http://www.trends.ifrf.net/trends/archive.html.