Friday 2 February 2018

EAM18 - Orlando, Florida




The Sheffield FMD group was well represented at the recent electronic and advanced materials (EAM18) conference in Orlando, Florida. A delegation of eleven, ranging from PhD students to professors delivered over 9 talks and several posters.

EMA is a great conference to attend if you are researching in the functional oxides/electroceramics field. There were symposia dedicated to characterisation, sustainability, processing, modelling, specific applications and much more. Information on this years content can be found here:

http://ceramics.org/eam2018


We arrived in unusually cold weather for Florida at this time year. Although 16 degrees was somewhat an improvement compared to back in Sheffield. The great disappointment of not being able to board the Disney Magical express from Orland international airport was quickly erased by beer and food at hotel, with everyone ready for the conference commencing the next day.


Roger De Souza kicked off the conference with plenary talk on “Using transport studies to reveal the myriad secrets of SrTiO3”. Some amusing commentary on the existence of a perfect single crystal and under what circumstances referring to someone as a defect is in fact a complement. This stems from a joke native to our field “people are like crystals; their defects make them interesting”. Try telling that one at the pub…

Not quite Sheffield, but it will do!
Can't have you thinking we didn't do some science too! Whitney gives her talk
Thousands of miles from home and they go to an English style pub!



Several other key features of the conference included lunchtime tutorials for the students, a session of tutorials on Wednesday evening (one given by our own Derek Sinclair) and the final part of the conference: a symposium on learning from failure. The failure talks were highly amusing and perhaps comforting that some of the more established members of our scientific community make mistakes too. Lessons learned from this symposium include:

· Don’t try cutting carbon fibre with a laser.

· If attempting to publish your work in a pure science journal call your ceramic material a poly-crystalline material instead.

· You may need to go back to basics is you have found a really good ferroelectric material that also has a cubic crystal structure.

Done Sheffield proud!

Personal highlights from the conference include some phase field modelling of ferroelectric domains [1] and grain growth [2]. There were also some interesting impedance studies on degradation of dielectric materials and in-situ x-ray diffraction studies on flash sintering [3]. Talk titles are given as references. During the conference dinner the Sheffield group got a pleasant surprise when Richard Veazey was awarded 1st prize for the student talk competition. Well done and congratulations to him.


All in all, a great conference. Many thanks to the American Ceramics Society for organising the event and the SUBST grant for funding the travel. I recommend EAM (now EMA) to anyone working in a relevant field.


1. (EAM-ELEC-S7-002-2018) New developments in Ferret, an opensource code for simulating complex behavior of electroactive materials at mesoscale J. Mangeri; L. Kuna; K. Pitike; P. Alpay; O. Heinonen; S. Nakhmanson.

2. (EAM-BASIC-S1-006-2018) A Framework to Study Heterogeneous Factors that Influence Grain Growth (Invited) D. Lewis; A. Baskaran

3. (EAM-BASIC-S2-003-2018) Flash Sintering of a Two- and Three-Phase Composites Constituted of Alumina, Spinel, and Yttria-Stabilized Zirconia D. Kok; E. Sortino; D. Yadav ; S. J. McCormack; K. Tseng; W. M. Kriven; R. Raj; M. Mecartney.

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