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The Shot Glass Drop competition gave students and young professionals a chance to put their on-the-spot design talents to the test. This clip shows a “victory drop” of the winning design by Jessica Serra.

The ICACC meeting in Daytona Beach wraps up today. I left on Wednesday after more than a week on the conference circuit. I was ready to come home, but I confess that the balmy sunshine was working for me. (It’s cold, cloudy and snowy where I live.)

Here are some final sights and sounds from the meeting, but I’ll have more to say about what I saw and heard in the weeks to come.

Monday evening's reception for students and young professionals was well attended and, according to reports, a lot of fun.

A vendor and customers talk shop at Tuesday's Expo.

Posters were displayed on the perimeter of the Expo floor.

While the Expo was going on, so was a Shot Glass Drop competition for students and young professionals. Sponsored by Schott Glass, contestants had about 30 minutes to construct a contraption out of 30 plastic drinking straws that would protect a free falling Schott-made shot glass. Most of the 16 entries survived to the maximum height, which was in the neighborhood of 12 feet. If they reached the maximum height, contestants then were required to remove two straws each round until only one survived. The winning design won with 24 straws. The video clip above shows winner Jessica Serra’s “victory drop,” one final drop after she was being declared the victor. It survived.

The glass and straws.

Intense concentration from a team.

And the winner is Jessica Serra, shown with judges Greg Hilmas (left) and Sean Landwehr. Jessica recently joined the staff of Pratt-Whitney.

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Some of the German delegation of participants in the first Global Young Investigators Forum at ICACC. Thomas Fisher (third from left) was the principle organizer of the forum.

The 36th convening of the International Conference and Exposition on Advanced Ceramics and Composites is in its second day in Daytona Beach, Fla. This year’s meeting attracted over 1,000 engineers and scientists from 41 countries, who will be presenting about 850 papers. According to the organizers, this year, for the first time, the number of foreign attendees has surpassed the number of US attendees.

Two factors are contributing to the strong international participation: the first European Union–USA Ceramics Summit and the first Global Young Investigators Forum. The EU-USA summit is taking place on Monday and Tuesday and attracted about 25 talks with participants from Germany, Italy, Sweden, Czech Republic, Finland, Belgium, Poland and Spain.

The Global Young Investigators Forum starts tomorrow and runs through the end of the week. The GYIF is a new innovation this year, and all indications are that it’s an idea that is long overdue. Thomas Fisher, PhD candidate at the University of Cologne, Germany, organized the Forum, which will have 45 presentations from PhD candidates and post-docs from more than 14 countries. I’ll have more to tell about the Forum later.

I’m told the weather in Daytona Beach in January can be hit or miss, and since Sunday, it’s been all “hit,” with temperatures in the upper 70s and sunshine.

Here is a catalog of some of the things I’ve been seeing.

George Wicks, ACerS president, and Sanjay Mathur, program chair.

ICACC'12 kicked off with a lively reception on Sunday.

Colleagues and friends met at the reception. Pictured from the left, Lise Schioler, George Quinn and Eileen De Guire.

Jay Singh presented the Society with a gift on behalf of the Indian Ceramic Society. Pictured with Jay are Charlie Spahr (ACerS executive director), George Wicks and Megan Bricker (ACerS director of membership).

Monday's plenary session drew a rapt audience.

David Marshall delivered the first plenary talk and was awarded the James I. Mueller Award.

The beach was no distraction for these attendees.

Andrew Portune of Nottingham, Md., is enjoying the meeting.

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Scanning electron microscope image of a bioactive glass scaffold seeded with human osteoblasts (MG-63). The seeded cells are distributed over the whole scaffold area and well adhered on the surface. This image shows that bone cells can grow on and through this bioactive glass construct. Credit: Boccaccini; Uni-Erlangen.

Following last year’s successful Pacific Rim Engineering Ceramics Summit, The ACerS Engineering Ceramics Division has organized a transatlantic European Union-USA Ceramics Summit for the upcoming 36th International Conference on Advanced Ceramics and Composites (36th ICACC), Jan. 22-27, 2012 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

According to organizers of the summit, there has been major progress in the R&D and commercialization of engineered ceramics over the last 50 years in Europe and the US. Seminal contributions have led to the engineering of ceramics with multifunctional properties and broad applications in energy, aerospace, healthcare, communication, infrastructure, transportation, environmental, and other industries. As a result, the living standards and quality of life have been raised for people worldwide.

The goal of the EU-USA Summit is to provide a forum for the information exchange on current status and emerging trends in innovative ceramic technologies and to identify strategic elements and new materials technology pathways for a sustainable future.

The session runs Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday (Jan. 23-24) in Coquina Salon F (Hilton). Two of the 25 presentations from this Summit are highlighted below.

“Innovations in bioactive ceramics and glasses for tissue engineering, drug delivery and regenerative medicine”
Speaker, Aldo Boccaccini, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Abstract: Beyond the well-established and expanding applications of bioceramics in medicine, e.g. as permanent implants and bioactive coatings, there is increasing interest in developing bioactive ceramics and glasses and their composites with biodegradable polymers, for applications in the fields of tissue engineering and drug delivery. Specific innovations involving the design and fabrication of multifunctional scaffolds that combine a variety of biodegradable polymers, signaling molecules, therapeutic drugs and bioactive ceramics will be presented. In this context, significant efforts are being devoted to investigating the effect of the dissolution products of bioactive glasses, both silicate and phosphate glasses, on cellular response, which includes understanding the effect of specific metallic ions (bioinorganics) on osteogenesis and angiogenesis during bone formation, both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, gaining further understanding of the antibacterial effect of specific ions released from bioactive glasses for combating infections more effectively is of particular interest. Specific research areas attracting large research efforts will be presented and promising avenues for future research activities will be discussed, highlighting the current needs and challenges for improving the overall performance of bioactive ceramics in tissue engineering and drug delivery.

“New ceramic membranes for energy- and environmental applications”
Speaker: Alexander Michaelis, Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS, Germany

Abstract: Ceramic membranes are well established for micro-, ultra- or nano- filtration applications such as waste water purification. Further innovations require an improved control and reduction of pore size. This allows for new applications in gas separation and pervaporation systems. For this, pores sizes below 1 nm have to be generated using specific structural features of selected materials. Several new methods for preparation of such membranes are presented. In a first example we use the well know crystallographic cage structure of zeolites. Employing a new hydrothermal route allows for synthesis of dense zeolite films on porous substrates. It is shown that these membranes can be used for dewatering of bioethanol. In a further example we use carbon layers with well-defined lattice distances of 0.35 nm as a membrane for separation of hydrogen from gas mixtures. By further chemical modification of these carbon layers a well-designed adsorption selective behavior can be achieved as is demonstrated with membranes for purification of biogas. As a last example we present perovskite materials showing mixed conducting behavior. Due to an oxygen vacancy structure in the crystal lattice these materials can be used to generate oxygen which in turn can be used to improve the efficiency of combustion processes. Besides an improved energy balance in the combustion process this leads to reduction of CO2 emissions.

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