Coordinators :

Jean-Pierre Birat, ESTEP

Jean-Michel Most, ISAE-ENSMA

Olivier Vidal, CNRS, Isterre.

Material production, particularly from primary raw materials, is energy intensive and generates significant amounts of greenhouse gases. Energy needs are due to the fact that materials have to be "extracted" from their ores/raw materials by chemical reactions, often a reduction, which usually takes place at fairly high temperatures. 

At industry level, energy costs are an important part of conversion costs and therefore energy efficiency, an externality, has been internalized and many steps have already been taken to bring it to a fairly high level of excellence, with more to come.

In this session, we wish to attract presentations from researchers and engineers from the industrial and academic communities, which would present the state-of-the art, describe related issues that remain open, present solutions under development and implementation, and more generally the methods and tools used to deal with these issues in the various sectors of material production.

A discussion of breakthrough technologies would be more than welcome as well as of the societal dimensions of such approaches.

 The issue of the circular economy is also part of the topic, as long as an effort is made to analyze the energy efficiency of the material loop.

 It would also be interesting to discuss the use of renewable energies, which is not yet a very popular yet in this context.