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The IUPAC Conferences on High Temperature
Materials Chemistry were initiated by the Inorganic Division’s
Commission on High-Temperature Materials and Solid State
Chemistry (II. 3) in 1977 and have become the premier
international venue for exploring the combination of chemistry
and materials science as these affect understanding, production
and utilization of high-temperature materials. As part of its
service to the high-temperature and materials chemistry
communities, the IUPAC Inorganic Chemistry Division and its
former Commission have provided overall organization and
continuity of the series, along with selection, coordination,
and guidance of the individual conference local organizers. The
eleventh conference in the HTMC series was held 19-23 May 2003
in Tokyo, Japan, the first time that an HTMC conference has been
held in Asia. It was organized by Prof. Michio Yamawaki of the
University of Tokyo with the help of Prof. T. Terai, Prof. S.
Nagasaki and Prof. K. Morita. The Tokyo conference provided
significant opportunities for constructive interchange between
basic and applied researchers, with particular emphasis on
material synthesis, nuclear energy application and electronic
functional materials. The fundamental contributions were
primarily in the areas of thermodynamics, gas phase/ liquid
phase/ solid phase chemistries, and interface chemistry.
There were about 140 papers and 140 participants from 16
countries at this successful meeting. The number of papers and
participants at this meeting was somewhat smaller than
anticipated beforehand because of unexpected spread of infection
of the new respiratory disease named SARS in some parts of the
world other than Japan, and also the Iraq war that broke out in
March 2003. To ensure productive dialog between basic science
and applications and among industry, research laboratory and
academic scientists, the conference, following tradition, was
held with no parallel sessions and with lots of opportunities
for formal and informal discussions. The majority of the papers
were presented in poster sessions. In addition, there were 7
invited plenary lectures, 18 keynote lectures, 6 shorter oral
presentations, and 5 hands-on demonstrations of computerized
thermodynamic databases.
The plenary lectures to be published in a future issue of Pure
and Applied Chemistry introduced the following different topics
and sessions: phase diagram calculation and its application to
alloy design (K. Ishida, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan);
novel molten salt electrochemical reactions (Y. Ito, Kyoto
University, Kyoto, Japan); interaction of water vapor with
oxides at elevated temperatures (N. Jacobson, NASA Glenn
Research Center, Cleveland, USA); crystal growth of
superconductive oxide from oxide melts (Y. Shiohara,
International Superconductivity Technology Center, Tokyo,
Japan); oxygen diffusion and exchange in materials for ceramic
membrane applications (J. A. Kilner, Imperial College of Science
Technology and Medicine, London, UK); stability of Lix, LixHy
and LinOm clusters and their relevance to fusion, primodal and
hypervalent molecules (C. H. Wu, Max-Planck Institute for Plasma
Physics, Garching, Germany); and actinide research related to
nuclear fuel and fuel cycle (J. P. Glatz, ITU, Karlsruhe,
Germany).
Keynote lectures by leaders of their fields comprised
presentations, discussing and using varied techniques, including
high-temperature mass spectrometry, NMR measurement and X-ray
absorption fine structure (XAFS) techniques; a number of
forefront experimental and modeling studies of ceramic materials
and oxides; and studies of alloys, photocatalytic materials,
SnO2 nanotubes, molten salts, supercritical fluids and fuel
cells. These papers, along with the other oral and poster
presentations, illustrated the tremendous variety of physical
and chemical techniques that are utilized, and of systems that
are studied, under the umbrella of “high-temperature
materials”.
The two meetings that immediately preceded HTMC-XI in this
well-established and successful IUPAC series were in Jülich,
Germany (2000) and State College, Pennsylvania, USA (1997).
Following a pattern of meeting every three years on a different
continent, the next conference, HTMC-XII, is scheduled for 2006.
It will be held in Vienna, Austria, hosted by Prof. Adolf Mikula
of the University of Vienna (Mikula@ap.univie.ac.at).
[Prepared by Michio Yamawaki, HTMC-XI Conference Organizer, and
Gerd M. Rosenblatt, President, Inorganic Division.]
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