On the 12th-13rd of June 2008 around 20 people from all over Europe participated in the biannual Technical and Business Meeting of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering on Drying(EFCE) at GEA Niro. The participants were mainly working party members. Of these most were from universities, but a few industral members joined the meeting too. The gathering was a great opportunity for the participants to present their current work and to discuss drying with similarly disposed people.
Apart from the scientific presentations the partcipants also visited Amagerforbraendingen; a waste inceneration plant in Copenhagen equipped with GEA Niro spray dryers for cleaning the fluegas from SO2 and other gasous pollutants.
“This is a good way to meet with someone involved with the same kind of work as you and maybe be inspired by their methods in the drying industry,” says Michael Wahlberg from GEA Niro, who organized the meeting together with Thomas Metzger from Otto-von-Geuricke University .
Thursday night the formal working party meeting meeting was held for the work group of EFCE. Here, the current chairman Professor Tsotsas from the Otto-von-Guericke Univrsity in Magdeburg, Germany, handed over the chairmanship to his collegue, Professor Patric Perré from Lermag-Engref in France.
Patrick Perré has been working with modelling the drying of wood (heat and mass transfer, mechanics). He is head of a laboratory (LERMAB in Nancy, France) entirely dedicated to wood as a material and has most up-to-date experimental equipment to study drying behaviour and provide the parameters for his mircoscopic modelling. At the International Drying Symposium in Sao Paulo (2004) he received the award for "Innovation in drying".