Last week I attended Finnish-Swedish Flame Days 2013, which took place on 17th and 18th April in Jyväskylä, in the middle of Finland.

The main topics were combustion and gasification of coal and biomass.  There were also some presentations about flameless technology, optical and spectrometer instrumentation, CFD modeling and related technologies.

Ari Saario, Finnish Committee Chairman, opened the conference, followed by Timo Koivisto with greetings from the city of Jyväskylä.  I was then invited to make a short presentation about the IFRF and to showcase our new Facilities brochure and talk about the services available to IFRF Members.

The morning keynotes were offered by IFRF Vice President Prof. Hartmut Spliethoff, on the role of solid fuel conversion in future power generation and Dr. Christian Fredriksson from LKAB about combustion in rotary kilns for iron ore pellet production.  In the afternoon the keynote speakers were Prof. Mikko Hupa from Åbo Akademi who addressed challenges in combustion of low grade biomasses, and Tero Saarno from Jyväskylän Energia on Experiences on co-firing peat with wood in BFB and CFB plants of Jyväskylän.

The program and all the presentations are available to IFRF members on the FFRC website.

The organization of the events was excellent, and both Aino Leppänen and Markku Nikku, current and former Finnish committee secretaries, were responsible for this.

The only hitch was that flying back to Pisa took over 18 hours, with 5 hours at Helsinki airport and 5 hours at Paris airport!