Yazawa International Symposium on Metallurgical and Materials Processing Principles and Technologies
San Diego, USA, March 3-6, 2003

The Yazawa International Symposium was held during the TMS 2003 Annual Meeting and Exhibition in San Diego, 3-6 March 2003. As usual the TMS conference is large and covers the whole spectrum of materials and metals processing. The reviewers attended only the Yazawa conference, which covered the whole week of the TMS 2003 meeting. As usual the regular TMS meeting went ahead with a multitude of parallel sessions covering all aspects of non-ferrous metallurgy as well as materials science and processing.

This conference was organised to honour the distinguished work and lifetime achievements of Prof. Akira Yazawa in metallurgical and materials processing. Prof. Yazawa was a world prominent professor at Tohoku University in metallurgical and materials processing, Sendai, Japan. He has published over 300 technical papers in the past 50 years. Yazawa diagram for copper matte smelting is known by almost every copper metallurgist. Although he has retired, he is still very active in the metallurgical world. Yazawa International Symposium was the main focus for the world process metallurgists in the annual meeting. It attracted a great number of world renowned metallurgists from academic organisations and metallurgical industry, from more than 37 countries.

In the first morning of the TMS Annual Meeting, a plenary session was organised for all participants, and was chaired by Prof. H.Y. Sohn (University of Utah) and Dr. F. Kongoli (Flogen Technologies Inc.). Prof. Yazawa and his wife were present at the plenary session. The meeting began with an introduction to “Lifetime achievements of Prof. Akira Yazawa” by Prof. Kimo Itagaki from Tohoku University, followed by a number of renowned speakers, such as “Contribution of copper smelting technology to preserving global environment” by Akira Nishikawa from Mitshubishi Materials Corporation, “Non-ferrous metals – the challenges in production and technology transfer” by J. Järvinen from Outkokumpu Research Centre, and “The role of lead smelting at Korea Zinc” by Chang-Young Choi from Korea Zinc company. There are also two more academic presentations about the metallurgical slags.

From afternoon of March 3, the symposium continued in 5 parallel sessions in San Diego Marriott Hotel. As is well reflected by the 3 volume conference proceedings with 201 papers, the symposium covers a wide range of issues in metallurgical and materials processing.

• In Volume 1 “Materials Processing Fundamentals and New Technologies”, it covers with 108 papers the largest topic of this symposium. Discussed in the papers are the usual studies on kinetics and thermodynamics of metals and sulphide systems, slags and fluxes, elemental losses and distributions, alloy properties, experimental techniques, nonferrous processing, and iron and steel making. It is notable that also iron and steel making metallurgy was discussed at this TMS meeting, which is usually the home for the metallurgy of non-ferrous metals. A large section on non-ferrous processing covered various interesting topics ranging from roasting of zinc concentrates, molten salts in metal production, problems and progress in the modelling of non-ferrous processes, sulphide smelting in general, zinc fuming, nitride chemistry, to name but a few. Also prominent at the symposium was a section on recycling, waste treatment and environmental covering among others fundamental thermodynamic aspects of Tallium distribution in smelters, dioxin formation during sintering to the CFD simulation of industrial municipal and chemical waste incinerators to improve their performance. A final section on materials processing, and casting and aluminium processing concluded this section.
• In Volume 2 “High Temperature Metals Production”, the production of major nonferrous metals are broadly addressed by 58 papers, including copper, lead – zinc, nickel, general nonferrous production, and iron and steel making, as well as recycling and environmental issues. A number of interesting papers from industry made this a very valuable part of the conference. Interesting were the papers in the Zinc and Lead session covering topics such as the modelling of an Imperial Smelting Furnace, experiences with direct lead smelting and an overview of modern technology for lead smelting. A large session on copper metallurgy included papers on an overview of continuous copper converting, Ausmelt and Isasmelt technologies, papers on flash smelting, discussions on various issues around copper slags as well as the discussion of recent developments on certain industrial plants.
• In Volume 3 “Aqueous and Electrochemical Processing”, wide range topics of hydrometallurgical processing and molten salt electrolysis were covered by 35 papers.

Due to the limited space, it is not possible to give more details on the individual papers and presentations. The interested readers can consult the table of contents of each of the three volumes from the TMS webpage (www.tms.org). In the authors’ opinion it is worthwhile that metallurgists and process engineers should have this collection of 3-volume proceedings in their bookcases for reference purposes.

This symposium was a well organised event and very interesting for the participants and presenters alike. The sessions were well attended, discussions were lively and interesting, often an enjoyment to the reviewers.

M.A. Reuter and Y. Yang, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. Email: M.A.Reuter@CITG.TUDelft.NL)