START at World PM 2022 in Lyon (October 2022)

The 2022 World Congress and Exhibition on Powder Metallurgy was organised this year by the European Powder Metallurgy Association, member of the START consortium, and took place in the beautiful Lyon Congress Centre, from 9th to 13th October.

This event, that belongs to the World Congress series organised every second year on a rotation basis by the Asian, American and European powder metallurgy associations (and thus every 6 years in Europe), was the first in-person after the Covid pandemic outburst, as the 2020 American edition had sadly to be cancelled. As far as Europe is concerned, the last in-person congress organised by EPMA was the Euro PM2019 in Maastricht (NL), that was followed by two online editions of the EuroPM in 2020 and 2021.

Notwithstanding some still existing strong barriers to travel especially for Chinese interested industrials and academicians, the Congress - a large event with about 80 sessions and more than 250 high quality, peer-reviewed technical presentations scattered over the 4 days -, and the top level Exhibition - with about 200 exhibitors representing (almost) the whole world -  attracted about 1100 participants, showing that the powder metallurgy community felt a strong driving force towards meeting again in person and not via remote connections.

The next World Congress will take place in Yokohama (Japan) in October 2024, whereas the dates for the next Euro PM2023, that will be in Lisbon (Portugal), are 1st-4th October 2023.

START took the occasion to be in Lyon to strengthen the ties with powder metallurgy, that is going to be a big part in the development of out thermoelectric devices, and organised a START exhibition both. In addition to that, 2 presentations were given by the coordinator F. Neves (LNEG), one in the Exhibition hall (Industry Corner) and one in the Congress programme.

The consortium prepared a booth with posters, roller banners, leaflets, a small showcase with some samples of rocks, powders and thermoelectric devices, plus a screen with an introductory video about START where our robot friend Starty explained the basic ideas of the project.

There was some interest and some visitors left their business card to be re-contacted and included in the START mailing list (remember that you can always do that on our "Contact" page!).

Two other companies in the consortium, Genicore and MBN Nanomaterialia, had their own booth in the Exhibition. Thus, the coordinator and some of the consortium members managed to meet together at the booth, and you can see that in one of the pictures below!

The coordinator Filipe Neves of LNEG was invited by the EPMA to give two presentations:

• Industry Corner: 30’ presentation slot in the Exhibition area. “Sustainable Energy Harvesting Systems Based on Innovative Mine Waste Recycling”, Speaker F. Neves. This presentation took place on Tuesday 11/10/2022, 13:15-13:45.
• EuroFM Sectoral Group Meeting: “The START project” : F. Neves was invited to present during the open meeting of the Functional Materials Sectoral Group of EPMA, on Tuesday 11/10/2022, 17:00-18:30. This was also a 30' slot where the coordinator showed with a few slides all information about the project's scope and planned activities.

In addition to these, the Technical Managers of EPMA, B. Vicenzi and K. Boz, mentioned START in all their presentations during all the Sectoral Group meetings (for a total of 6 meetings and mentions).