• IFRF in Dunkirk: French Flame’s General Assembly

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      Lucy Straker

      IFRF Administration & Communication Coordinator

In June, IFRF was invited to join the French Flame Research Committee (Comité Francois – CF) at their General Assembly at TOTAL OLEUM in Dunkirk, France.

We joined over 20 French Flame members as they gathered to share updates on their latest projects and hear the feedback from the IFRF 2018 Conference (which happened the previous week).

The meeting was held at the TOTAL OLEUM site which is the European training centre for Oil & Petrochemicals industries of Total Group. OLEUM is the first European training centre to offer tailor-made training courses in an industry-scale processing plant.

In order to reach the meeting room we were treated to a short trip across the site in a driverless, electric car which was an example of the leading edge technology on display here.

The meeting was split into three sections an update and presentations from across the membership, a dinner on a piece of history and an interesting tour of the TOTAL OLEUM site.

For the first part we heard updates from the chair of CF and IFRF Vice-President Sébastien Caillat, Claude Prébendé, TOTAL, David Honoré, CORIA CNRS Rouen and Lucy Straker on behalf of IFRF. Following these updates were technical presentations from Jacques Dugué, TOTAL on the criteria for safe burner ignition; David Barré, GDTech on their innovation projects and finally Toufik Boushaki, CNRS Orléans on turbulent swirling flames with O2 enrichment for CO2 capture.

As we moved into the evening, the attendees were treated to a three course dinner on the Princess Elizabeth – a paddle steamer which in World War II helped transport British and French soldiers to the UK during the Battle of Dunkirk.

The next day we were treated to a demonstration of BioTfueL – a project launched by Total and five partners designed to transform lignocellulosic biomass (straw, forest waste, dedicated energy crops) into biofuel via thermochemical conversion. The goal is to develop an end-to-end set of processes for producing second-generation biodiesel and biojet fuel. You can see what we saw here in this short video.