The Ninth International Meeting of Pacific Rim Ceramic Societies (PAC RIM 9) incorporating AUSTCERAM 2011 took place from 10 to 14 July in Cairns, Australia. It incorporated the Ninth International Conference on Advances in the Fusion and Processing of Glass (AFPG-9), the biennial meeting of the Australian Ceramic Society.

The first in the series of PAC RIM conferences on ceramic and glass technology was hosted by the American Ceramics Society in Hawaii, 1993. Since then it has been hosted by a number of ceramic societies around the Pacific Rim. The Australian Ceramics Society hosted PAC RIM 9 and was the second time the Australian society had hosted this international meeting and networking event.

A local dance troupe at the PAC RIM 9 conference dinner (photo credit: ACerS).

Dr. Deanna D'Alessandro from the University of Sydney presenting an invited presentation at the Functional Nanoporous Materials symposium.

The event drew over 700 delegates from 35 countries, including approximately 150 students. Approximately 20% of attendees were Australian. Dr Phil Walls from Hitechmaterials Pty Ltd and President of the Australian Ceramic Society, was Chair of the PAC RIM 9 event and worked hard alongside the organizing committee to create a successful meeting.

PAC RIM 9 had 23 Symposia and a workshop on “cementitious materials”. Functional materials, particularly energy materials, were a hot topic at the event. There were at least six symposia with an energy-materials flavor, one of which was dedicated to the overarching problem of “The World Wide Increasing Demand in Energy”. A pre-conference Workshop was also held on “Nanomaterials for Clean Energy” at the University of Queensland on 8 July.

Plenary speakers were Professor Neil Alford (Imperial College, UK), Professor Paul Ducheyne (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Dr James McCauley (Army Research Laboratory, USA), Professor Kiyoshi Okada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan), Professor Martin Richardson (University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL), Professor Giorgio Sberveglieri (University of Brescia, Italy), Dr Mrityunjay Sing (NASA Glenn Research Center, USA), and Professor Enrico Traversa (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan). Plenary talks reflected the research areas of the symposia, including three talks covering different aspects of energy materials research: Professor Kiyoshi Okada “Porous Ceramics Effective for Energy Saving Applications”, Dr Mrityunjay Sing “Ceramic Integration Technologies for Advanced Energy and Environmental Systems: Critical Needs, Technical Challenges, and Opportunities” and Professor Enrico Traversa “Towards the Miniaturization of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells”.

Conference papers submitted to PAC RIM 9 were published in the Journal of the Australian Ceramic Society, with the exception of the Bioceramics symposium, which were published in the Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine, the symposium “The World Wide Increasing Demand in Energy”, which were published in “Energy Materials”, and the symposium “Structure, Properties and Photonic Applications of Glasses” which were published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

PAC RIM 10 will be hosted by the American Ceramics Society in June 2013 at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, California. Dr H. T. Lin (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) is Conference Chair.