The following are amongst the matters dealt with at the April meeting of the IFRF Executive:

From a Statutory and organisational perspective, Jacques Dugué of Total France was confirmed as IFRF Vice President.  The addition of Jost Wendt and Mikko Hupa to the B Member group brings this element of the Joint Committee to the full complement of 5 allowed.

Members’ Conference and international meetings
The 2009 Members Conference and the Joint Committee Meeting were confirmed for Boston in June 2009.  Precise dates, the venue and the theme will be decided and communicated to Members as soon as possible.

TOTeM 31 on the topic Oxycoal will be arranged for October 2008 in Pisa.  The topic of TOTeM 32, also in the planning stage, has been confirmed as Rotary Kilns.  TOTeM 32 will be chaired by Mikko Hupa and Prof. H Tran.  The venue is Pisa and the date, to be confirmed, February 2009. 

Members’ Research Programme
Current status
Deputy Superintendent of Research Neil Fricker reported that he had inspected the rebuilt IJmuiden Isothermal Plug Flow Reactor (IPFRF) and that the device is almost ready for final installation of services, although reconstruction was delayed by the need to replace two refractory tube sections (damaged during transport to Italy) and all of the electrical heaters (functional, but not in conformity with Italian electrical regulations).  A more modern control and monitoring system has also been installed.  The IPFR will be recommissioned at the end of May.

Solid Fuels Database: Dr Hercog’s report identifying all solid fuels characterised at IFRF and summarising all the solid fuel combustion characterisation data contained in IFRF reports should be issued as soon as it has been approved by the Superintendent of Research, Hartmut Spliethoff.  Data has been loaded into an Access database from which it is also possible to extract information as Excel sheets.  These will be released initially to the participants at the Workgroup Meeting to be held in Germany in June, and later to the broader IFRF Membership.  The data will also be further analysed by a sub group of interested members led by Mikko Hupa.  In addition, as soon as the IPFR has been recommissioned, new data will be generated on fuels specified by sponsors ENEL and EDF. 

Experimental activity for CFD validation: Two reports on burner tests on FOSPER (Furnace N.1) have been drafted by Giovanni Coraggio on last year’s work and are awaiting publication.  These reports are preparatory for the project “Validation of combustion modelling for practical combustion systems” since the IFRF will focus on collection of “in flame” data, will define ad hoc experiments for sub-models and will develop databases for fuel properties and characteristics to be used in comprehensive models.

As regards the large scale experiments for validation of CFD codes at conditions relevant for industrial purposes, ENEL is funding air and oxy-coal combustion tests on internally staged burners in Furnace N.1.  Trials are planned for June.  In addition, an ENEL report comparing FOSPER results with CFD models has been drafted and ENEL has agreed to share this with IFRF Members.  The report will be published in Current Reports on line at www.ifrf.net.

Plans for 2008-2009: There will be two FOSPER trial series in 2008, TEA-C burner in June, and AASB later in the year.  (The dates will be communicated as soon as possible to allow interested members to attend.)

National Committee representatives have been requested to come to the June meeting of the Joint Committee ready to discuss their views of the objectives for the Members’ Research Programme in 2010/11. 

IFRF Publications
The following changes were mooted to the IFRF publications:

Journal: Mikko Hupa was invited to take up the Chairmanship of the Journal’s Editorial Board with the following initial tasks:
• Rewriting the Journal’s objectives;
• Recreating the Editorial Board;
• Increasing the number of articles per year with a view to entering a citation index within 5 years;
• Making the Journal available to non IFRF Members via a paid subscription; 

It was further agreed that Conferences could provide a focus for the Journal as regards material.  Leonardo Tognotti undertook to provide an initial list of articles based on papers given at the 15th Members’ Conference.

Handbook: Jacques Dugué agreed to become Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Handbook which is to be relaunched with a strengthened focus on Spreadheet based calculating procedures for practising Engineers and Engineering Students.  .

Archived IFRF reports: Reports ordering activity over the period Jan – March 2008 was briefly overviewed.  It was decided to put a six month report to the Joint Committee at the June meeting along with suggestions about a possible modification of the reports policy.  Specific suggestions were as follows:
• Add papers from TOTeMs and Conferences to the Reports Archive
• Offer Members the opportunity to purchase the entire Reports Archive on DVD at a price to be decided.
• For each report provided in PDF format, include the OCR version to enable users to search and manipulate the data.

Finally the IFRF’s Training and education strategy was discussed.  MNM readers will already know that the IFRF School of Combustion will be held at Livorno between 8 – 12 September 2008 and that they should consult the IFRF Events Calendar for more information within a few weeks.