CASC ran its first ceramics summer school at Imperial College London from 14 to 16 September 2010. The school brought together twenty attendees from outside Imperial College with a wide range of backgrounds and an even mixture of industrial and academic experience, providing a venue for dialogue and networking.

Presenters at the first CASC Summer School included: Prof. Aldo Boccaccini, Prof. Jerome Chevalier, Prof. Manish Chhowalla, Dr Jaime Franco, Dr Finn Giuliani, Prof. Mike Reece and Prof. Eduardo Saiz.

Tenth Summer School 2019

The 10th edition of the CASC Summer school on ceramics took place the 4-6th of September 2019 at the Royal School of Mines in London.

Our Summer school is designed for early career engineers and scientists from industry and academia who want to enhance their knowledge on both ceramic processing and structural properties and is articulated around core and guest lectures changing every year.

That year's guest lecturers already include Prof. Sylvain Meille (MATEIS, INSA Lyon), who talked about mechanical properties of porous ceramics, and Prof. Raul Bermejo (Montanuniversitaet Leoben), who talked about ceramic reliability through component’s design, Prof. Joaquin Ramirez-Rico (Univerity of Sevilla), who delivered a lecture on ceramic high temperature creep. 

Ninth Summer School 2018

The ninth edition of CASC Ceramic’s Summer School took place from the 10th to the 12th of September.

The first day was focused on mechanical properties of Ceramics and their use in Thermal Barrier Coatings and Solid Oxide Fuel Cells, with the talks of Dr Finn Giuliani (Imperial College), Professor Ping Xiao (Manchester University) and Professor Alan Atkinson (Imperial College).

On Tuesday, we also had the visit from some of the members of the Additive Manufacturing Initiative for Transnational Innovation in Europe (AMITIE) project as the day was focused on Additive Manufacturing. For this, we had a masterclass on the basics of additive manufacturing by Stephane Richaud (Saint Gobain) and Dr Andrea Zocca (BAM University and Young Ceramists Additive Manufacturing Network) together with two lab sessions focused on 3D Printing and on the demonstration of some of the mechanical properties discussed on the first day.

We finished the ninth edition of the Summer School with the invited talk of Dr Rachid M’Saoubi (SECO Tools) that gave us some industrial examples of the use of ceramics.

We hope the attendees enjoyed their stay here at Imperial College and hopefully we will see them at the 10th edition!.

The eighth edition of CASC Summer School took place at Imperial College from the 13th to 15th of September.

Atendees to the Eighth Summer School

The sixth edition of the Ceramic Summer School was held on 16, 17 and 18 September 2015 at Imperial College London. Starting at lunch time on Wednesday a full afternoon of activities was on offer with a tutorial on tailoring viscosity for colloidal shaping methods followed by a lab session demonstrating free form shaping techniques (green machining and 3D printing) and a lecture by Jonathan Phillips from Morgan Advanced Materials on Challenges and Opportunities for the Ceramic Industry.

Thursday opened with a masterclass on modelling of the powder compaction process chain by Torsten Kraft from the Fraunhofer Institute for the Mechanics of Materials in Freiburg (Germany). To reinforce the themes discussed in the masterclass, this was followed by a lab session in which the effects of pressure on compact quality was studied experimentally and using finite element software.

After lunch, Jianye Wang from John Crane UK discussed the ceramic materials in use for mechanical seals and Raul Bermejo from the Montanuniversität Leoben (Austria) gave a masterclass on slow crack growth.

The latter was reinforced in a lab session where the stress rate test for sensitivity to slow crack growth was carried out on glass. Finally on Friday, Luc Vandeperre from CASC introduced the use of strength statistics for designing with ceramics in an interactive tutorial with exercises.

The course was attended by a mix of people from Morgan Advanced Materials, Saint Gobain, the European Space Agency, a range of UK universities and an independent consultant.

Feedback from the attendees was that they would all recommend the school to a colleague as they gained knowledge from expert speakers over a good range of topics and had ample networking opportunities in a relaxed environment.

The fifth CASC Summer School on Ceramics took place from 17 to 19 September 2014 at Imperial College London.

The school consisted of (i) introductory lectures, called tutorials, on ceramic shape forming, on sintering and on mechanical properties, and (ii) laboratory experiments on size distributions of powders and milling, on colloidal suspensions and on mechanical properties.

A third component were master classes by experts in the field: Dr Esther Garcia-Tuñon Bianca from CASC on additive manufacturing, Dr David Pearmain and Dr Aminat Bolarinwa from Lucideon on scaling up field enhanced sintering for industrial application, Dr Annelies Malfliet (KU Leuven) on refractories for the copper industry and Prof John Fernie (AWE) on joining of ceramics.

89% of attendees were from industry and/or government labs and 94% would recommend the school to a colleague, especially if in need of a refresher or relatively new to the field.

The fourth CASC Summer School on Ceramics took place from 18 to 20 September 2013 at Imperial College London. There were about 22 attendees with a wide range of backgrounds and a good mixture of industrial and academic background.

Presenters included: Dr Tim Van Gestel, Prof Jozef Vleugels, Dr Jon Molina, Prof Eduardo Saiz, Dr Severin Hofmann, Prof John Fernie (AWE, UK).

The third CASC Summer School took place at Imperial College London from 12 to 14 September 2012. There were about 22 attendees with a wide range of backgrounds and a good mixture of industrial and academic background.

Presenters included: Dr Tim Clipsham, Prof. Serafin Moya, Dr Alessandro Alan Porporati, Prof. Fabrice Rossignol, Prof. Derek Sinclair and Dr Luc Vandeperre.

The second CASC Summer School took place at Imperial College London from 21 to 23 September 2011. There were just over 30 attendees, with more than half coming from universities and research organisations across Europe. Presenters included: Prof. Jerome Chevalier, Prof. Bill Clegg, Dr Tim Clipsham, Dr Urs Gonzenbach, Prof. Bill Lee and Dr Antoni Tomsia.