Prof. Paul Mayrhofer

Professor Paul Mayrhofer is University Professor of Materials Science at the Institute of Materials Science and Technology, Technische Universiaet Wien, TU Wien, since 2012. Paul is also Guest Professor at the Central South University, Changsha, Hunan (China). He received a Ph.D. in 2001 and Habilitation in 2005 in Materials Science at the University of Leoben. Paul spent his post-doc and Erwin-Schrödinger-Fellowship at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, RTWH Aachen, and Linkoping University. His research activities focus on the development and characterization of vapor phase deposited nanostructured materials by a combination of computational and experimental material science. He has pioneered age hardening within hard ceramic thin films based on ternary nitrides and borides and given more than 40 invited presentations (including plenary and key note lectures). Paul is member of the “Junge Kurie” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, President of the Austrian Vacuum Society, and Editor for the Elsevier Journal Vacuum. At TU Wien he also is Dean of Academic Affairs at the Faculty Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and chairs the Master Study Program for Materials Science.

Topic of Keynote: Innovative Coatings for Tooling, Machining, Aerospace, Energy and Automotive Industry

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Prof. Yuyuan Zhao

Prof. Yuyuan Zhao obtained his BEng and MSc degrees from Dalian University of Technology, and PhD degree from Oxford University. He worked as a Lecturer at Dalian University of Technology, a Research Associate at the MADYLAM Laboratory of CNRS, and a Research Fellow at Birmingham University, before he joined Liverpool University in 1998 as a Lecturer. He was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer, Reader and then Professor.

He is currently the Head of Centre for Materials and Structures, a Department of the School of Engineering, the University of Liverpool. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM). He is a member of the Particulate Engineering Committee, the British Composites Society Committee, the ASM/TMS Composite Materials Committee and the Editorial Board of Powder Metallurgy. He served as the President of the Liverpool & North Wales Materials Society and in a number of scientific committees of international conferences.

Dr. Zhao’s research work has covered many areas, including plasma carburising of steels, manufacturing of fibre-reinforced metal matrix composites, vacuum plasma spraying, spray forming and powder production by centrifugal atomization, and the manufacture, characterisation and applications of porous metals and metal matrix syntactic foams.

He pioneered the Sintering and Dissolution Process (SDP) for manufacturing aluminium foam, which inspired the subsequent developments of several powder-based space-holder methods for manufacturing metal foams. He further invented the Lost Carbonate Sintering (LCS) process, a more versatile and cost-effective method for producing micro-porous metals. The LCS technology has led to the creation of Versarien, a highly successful start-up company which was floated on London Stock Market in 2013.

Dr. Zhao was awarded the Ivor Jenkins Medal in 2015 by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining for his contribution to powder metallurgy in developing and commercialising innovative powder based technologies for manufacturing metal foams.

Topic of Keynote: Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer in Porous Metals Manufactured by Lost Carbonate Sintering

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Dr. Gergely Kristóf

Dr. Gergely Kristóf earned his MSc degree at the present Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). In his PhD thesis he developed a two-fluid model for the expansion of partially ionized pellet clouds in hot fusion plasmas. He is currently associate professor at the Department of Fluid Mechanics of BME. Dr. Kristóf has a 16 years practice in the industrial application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), participated in about 300 industrial consultancy projects in several application fields, such as atmospheric flows, porous media flows, heat exchanger modeling, building services engineering, water treatment, hydraulics and pipe transients. He also played a significant role in the introduction of CFD into the Hungarian higher education. He is member of ERCOFTAC and the Scientific Advisory Committee of Von Karman Institute.

Topic of Keynote: Investigation of Transfer Characteristics of Complex Surfaces by using Periodic Models

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Dr. Thomas Adams

Dr. Thom Adams earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA, and his MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he has taught over 14 different courses and has won the coveted Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award. He has won best paper awards for both his work in engineering education and for technical research. The topic of his dissertation concerned both single-phase and two-phase heat transfer in microchannels, and represents some of the seminal work in the field. He has since become a leading educator in the field of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and has authored a first of its kind textbook on the subject, aimed at an audience of undergraduate technical majors, regardless of their particular field. His current research focuses on what he calls the “scholarship of generalisation,” in which physical systems and processes are purposely modelled using the most fundamental concepts and methods available in order to ascertain physical trends and correlations that often go unnoticed.

Topic of Keynote: On the Scholarship of Generalisation: Research at a Higher Level

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Dr. André Preumont

André Preumont received his MSc in Aeronautics from the university of Liege in 1973 and his PhD in Applied Sciences in 1981. He spent 10 years in industry before moving in academia. He has been a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 1987, full professor since 1991, and director of the Active Structures Laboratory. He is the author of 7 books. He is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy and was the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2011 (Darmstadt, Germany). He was a visiting professor at Virginia Tech (USA), UT Compiègne and INSA Lyon (France), and Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Relevant Publications:
A.PREUMONT, Random Vibrations and Spectral Analysis, Kluwer 1994.
A.PREUMONT, Vibration Control of Active Structures, An Introduction, third edition, Springer 2011.
A.PREUMONT, Mechatronics: Dynamics of Electromechanical and Piezoelectric Systems, Springer 2006.
A.PREUMONT, Twelve Lectures in Structural Dynamics, Springer 2013.
A.PREUMONT, K.SETO, Active Control of Structures, Wiley, 2008.

Topic of Keynote: A Guided Tour in Vibration Control: From Large Civil Structures to Precision Mechatronics

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Dr. Nicolas Abatzoglou

Dr. Nicolas Abatzoglou is full professor and ex-Head of the Department of Chemical & Biotechnological Engineering of the Université de Sherbrooke. He is Adjunct Professor at the University of Saskatchewan and Laval University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

He is a specialist in Process Engineering involving particulate systems. He is the Director of the UdeS Research Centre GREEN-TPV (Groupe de Recherche en Énergie/Environnement-Technologies et Procédés Verts).

Since May 2008, he is the holder of the Pfizer Industrial Research Chair in Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) in Pharmaceutical Engineering.

He is the Leader of Pyrolysis Project in Canada’s NCE Network BioFuelNet on Biorefining.

He is co-founder of the company Enerkem Technologies Inc., precursor of Enerkem Inc., a spin-off commercializing technologies in the field of energy from renewable resources.

His scientific production includes a 100+ publications, reviews, conferences, keynotes, plenaries and invited lectures, patents and three book chapters.

Topic of Keynote: Production of Carbon Nanofilaments from Waste Streams and Their Use as Polymers Additives

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