The eerie silence which has filled the Livorno office for almost two weeks has afforded us the opportunity to focus on numerous initiatives which had been requiring our attention and will shortly become a reality for members:

This week the experimental activity at the Livorno facility recommenced.  This had been temporarily suspended due to the modifications of some of the key rigs (furnace N.1-FOSPER in particular) to allow oxy-fuel combustion tests.  The system is now experiencing the initial tests on the new configuration and oxy-coal flame measurements will be carried out in the next weeks.

In the meantime the review process of some reports is ended and we are ready to publish two technical reports on the in-flame measurements and modelling performed before the plant shut down for modifications.

The TOTeM 31 speaker programme has been added to this week as more confirmations have been received, and will be updated on the IFRF website this week.  In the mean time we have received the first registrations and are expecting a successful meeting.

A detailed analysis of the feedback from the September course on Clean Industrial Fuel Conversion has been completed and a summary will be presented in next week’s MNM. Overall the course was very well received and there will definitely be a repeat performance in the future.

In line with a decision made at the June meeting of the Joint Committee, we have collected together the volumes containing the proceedings of all previous IFRF Members Conferences and TOTeMs. These enormous tomes will shortly be digitized and the papers made available electronically in the same way as has been done with the reports stored in the IFRF electronic library – searchable on line at http://www.library.ifrf.net/archive.html

Much as this period has been useful we have been highly inconvenienced by the breakdown in communications and are in almost hourly contact with TELEKOM ITALIA, the authors of our misfortunes.  We apologise again to all those who have been trying vainly to contact us and promise to reply to all that mail as soon as we are on line again – hopefully imminently.  Once again, urgent requests should be directed to Leo Tognotti tognotti@ing.unipi.it