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The first two-day programme was dedicated to students, PhD candidates, young researchers, and early-career professionals in the field of refractories and high-temperature materials, providing an up-to-date overview of sustainable refractory technologies, advanced computational methods, and multi-scale analytical techniques.

The programme combined lectures from 16 expert lecturers on:

• Raw materials: Sustainability, recycling and LCA
• Shaped refractories, formulation and processes
• Monolithic refractories, formulation and processes
• Thermodynamic and kinetics
• Fluid and gas reactive transportation (H2 reduction and combustion)
• Multi-scale material examination
• Ultra High Temperature Ceramics
• Coupling of material properties
• Testing vs. Modeling
• Additive Manufacturing and individual processing
• Upscaling of sensors, instrumentation and material needs: From lab scale to smart industrial concepts and installations
• Data mining and AI as a tool for industrial refractory-ceramic processes
• Refractories and HT materials in a changing industrial environment
• Improvement of product quality
• CO2 management

Check here all the topics!

The Summer School attracted 120 participants, including 87 onsite and  16 online attendees, representing 24 countries worldwide. Poster sessions were also held with a total of 12 posters presented. To facilitate the participation of young researchers, 20 travel grants of up to 500 € were sponsored by the JECS Trust, and 3 awards were attributed to young participants for the Best Poster Presentations.

On 30 August, participants joined a full-day excursion to Freiberg, including visits to TU Freiberg University in the morning and in the afternoon of the Freiberg Silver Mine or the Terra Mineralia Exhibition, before returning to Dresden. This social programme provided an excellent opportunity to explore a city historically linked to mining and materials science while strengthening connections across the FIRE and ECerS communities.

The 2025 ECerS-FIRE Summer School was a successful event, thanks to the support of the JECS Trust, which enabled broad participation and contributed significantly to the impact of the programme.