Special issue on innovative processes and materials

Abstract

Innovation in particulate processes is a challenging task in many industrial applications, such as for drug formulations, paints, coatings, ceramics and green products. This special issue, whose idea came from a French workshop, does not have the ambition to raise an exhaustive state of innovation in powder technology. Focusing on some examples of works performed in this domain, it aims to show that innovation can take several facets. It can be oriented either on the material, creating new products having creative properties or on the process itself, based on new routes for product synthesis or on conventional processes but used in non-conventional conditions. This special issue gathers 20 of the nearly 120 papers presented at the French Symposium on Particulate Processes which was held in Toulouse from the 4th to 6th of July, 2012. This congress was the 7th of a conference series aiming to bring together researches from industry and academia to debate the latest developments in particulate processing.