The report opens with a review from Sauro Pasini, IFRF’s President, who noted that  “2024 was a very important year in the history of the IFRF, because the foundation stopped looking around to see if it would survive and, taking that for granted, began to look to the future”.

Details on IFRF’s activities during 2024 include:

Strategy workshop- this a was face-to-face event at Fives offices in Paris in March 2024  attended by the IFRF management team, together with representatives from a number of its National Flame committees, Preferred Research Partners, member organisations and supporters. The key recommendations from the workshop were that:

• The programme of Topic Orientated Technical Meetings (TOTeMs) should be strengthened;
• Training is considered a key activity of IFRF and should be developed as a member offering;
• The Preferred Research Partner (PRP) network was confirmed as a useful tool and their use should be consolidated;
• Re-activate the role of IFRF to communicate about international or national collaborative projects, networking to build consortia and possibly coordinating projects;
• IFRF should continue to produce and distribute its bi-weekly newsletter (Monday Night Mail), and to make increased use of Linkedin to highlight key items;
• The on-line Industrial Combustion journal is considered as a low priority topic and should instead be maintained as an existing knowledge repository;
• The IFRF Handbook should not be fully developed, in line with the move to focus on training courses. A limited refresh should be considered to re-add the calculation spreadsheets to the handbook to restore its previous functionality; and 
• IFTF should assess the effort/cost to secure the archive by moving it online to the IFRF website.

In terms of IFRF’s technical programme, an IFRF technical meeting was held as part of the 14th European Conference on Industrial Furnaces and Boilers (INFUB-14) held on 2-5 April 2024 in the Algarve, Portugal. In addition, TOTeM #51 entitled ‘Green hydrogen: Advances in CFD Simulations of Industrial Hydrogen Flames’ was held as part of the AFRC’s Autumn Symposium  held in Calgary, Canada on the 1-3 October 2024. 

Further organic growth of the IFRF took place in 2024, with Amatek Land in the UK and Cenertec in Portugal joining the Associate Member Group, GRDF joining the French Flame committee and Danieli joining the Italian Flame Research Committee. The American Flame Research Committee (AFRC), having suspended its membership of IFRF in 2021, agreed for its individual members to have the option to rejoin as IFRF members in 2023 and two members of the AFRC, namely Bloom engineering and Messer, rejoined as IFRF members in 2024. This brings the total membership of IFRF to 81 member organisations.

Further consolidation of the IFRF Preferred Research Partner (PRP) network was undertaken with SINTEF in Sweden joining the network from January 2024. They were the seventh organisation in the network, providing potential access to 3 of their pressurised combustion, chemical looping combustion and gas turbine demonstration test facilities to IFRF member and supporting organisations.

IFRF also worked with its members and PRP organisations to explore opportunities to bid for externally funded collaborative research. During 2024, IFRF Ltd registered as an organisation with the EU (PIC number- 877879489), and took part as the dissemination partner in an EU bid ( LabyrintH2) submitted in April 2024. Although not selected for funding, this bid re-established IFRF as a potential project partner offering to lead or contribute to the dissemination work-package of projects related to fuels/decarbonisation in the energy and industrial fields.

The report also included the financial statements for IFRF, where the turnover in 2024 was £62.2k compared with £61.1k in 2023.  After the deduction of operating costs and taxes, the net surplus for the year was £4.8k, bringing the total reserve for IFRF on the last day of 2024 to £34.6k.

Overall, 2024 was an encouraging year for IFRF with continued consolidation of IFRF’s financial position through a mixed portfolio of income-generating activities focused on member subscriptions, technical events, and report sales. On behalf of IFRF, we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has participated in our activities and we look forward to your continued support in 2026 and beyond.

You can read the annual report for 2024 and previous years here.