Activities at Livorno in the last fortnight include a visit from Members John Zink Hamworthy, and preparation for the French Italian Joint Meeting in April as well as three upcoming TOTeMs.  TOTeM 42, “Industrial heating: Furnaces, Process Heaters, Kilns is highlighted in a separate article in this issue.  We are very excited to be planning this meeting at IJmuiden and to be working with our colleagues at NVV, the Dutch Association for flame research. On the research side we have focused on two private projects, Endesa and Industria 2015.

Visit by John Zink Hamworthy
In late January, three representatives of this international company stopped in at Livorno during a recruiting tour.  Our visitors were Charles Baukal – Director of John Zink Institute, and author of many excellent technical books on industrial combustion and heat transfer including the famous The John Zink Combustion Handbook, Hadj-Ali Gueniche, European Engineering Manager from the Luxembourg office, and Michele Nazzaro, Process Manager in Milan.

Our guests were given a tour of the Livorno facility, we had lunch together, and very a fruitful discussion took place.  I look forward to many such days with Members and colleagues from the combustion industry and warmly invite requests for cooperation from all interested parties worldwide.

Upcoming Events
TOTeM 42 and the French Italian Joint Meeting are featured elsewhere in this issue.  The First Announcement for TOTeM 42 is published this week.  The meeting will focus on the problems of designing and using thermal equipment in the process industry and will feature a site visit to the Tata Steel industrial plant at Velsen Noord. 

Readers of our first MNM of this year will know that we are also offering TOTeM 40 “Biomass Gasification – an industrial approach” in Gothenberg Sweden on April 8th and 9th 2014.  A RELCOM TOTeM entitled “Optimisation of OXY/COAL/FGR systems – state of the art for scaling and modelling” is planned for June 10th and 11th in Warsaw and will be publicized shortly.

Research
Endesa is owned by Enel and is the leading company in the Spanish electricity sector and the largest private electricity multinational in Latin America.  This week our investigators have completed the characterization of the performance of an oil combustion burner including atomization characterization. Enel’s Experimental Atomiser Rig (ISA) was utilised.

Industria 2015 is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development to advance innovative, moderate and intense low oxygen dilution (MILD) combustion technologies for strategic economic sectors.  IFRF has been required to design a “Y-mix” atomiser for cold water slurry, to test and characterise this atomiser at ISA, and to characterise the coal combustion in various oxygen enhanced conditions.