CERN Accelerating science

The first EIROforum workshop for Science and Business on Advanced Materials and Surfaces (WAMAS) took place at the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN on 19-20 November 2013.

The workshop focused on two areas of expertise: innovative materials and surfaces developed to withstand extreme environmental conditions; and the techniques used to study them. The event helped the sharing of knowledge related to these technical fields and facilitated new partnerships between research centres and industry.

”Particle accelerators and detectors are harsh environments for their component materials,” says CERN engineer Stefano Sgobba, chair of the WAMAS scientific committee. “We need materials that provide specific physical and mechanical properties across a large temperature range often including cryogenic temperatures. We also need these materials to be easy to machine and process.”

Materials used in such specific operating environments usually need the implementation of development and testing programmes or advanced processing. Materials for vacuum systems used in CERN accelerators, for example, are produced using special metallurgical processes to ensure adequate purity, cleanliness and fineness of the microstructure to guarantee the final leak tightness of components.

The WAMAS workshop was being organized under the EIROforum partnership between eight of Europe’s largest intergovernmental scientific research organizations, including CERN. EIROforum brings together the resources, facilities and expertise of its member organizations to support European science in reaching its full potential.

“EIROforum offers a privileged platform to organize events where research organizations active in different domains - from high-energy physics to space research - share their developments and future requirements in order to better reach industrial partners and establish long-lasting collaborations,” says Enrico Chesta, head of CERN’s Technology Transfer and IP Management Section, Knowledge Transfer Group, and chairman of the EIROforum Thematic Working Group on Innovation Management and Knowledge/Technology Transfer.

The event was also an excellent opportunity to showcase some of the preliminary results achieved in the frame of the EuCARD-2 project for coordinated research and development on particle accelerators.

A session of the workshop, co-organized with the Enterprise Europe Network through the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Rhône Alpes, was fully dedicated to meetings between research centres and industry representatives in order to facilitate knowledge transfer and the creation of new projects.

More information: https://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=229108