Every year, the Slovenian International Foundry Conference in Portoroz kicks off many autumn conferences and events. Event director M. Sc. Dpl. Eng. Mirjam Jan-Blazic, President of the Slovenian Foundry Association, together with the co-organisers from the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Ljubljana and the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maribor, welcomed nearly 280 delegates and about 40 exhibiting companies to the 63rd IFC.
This year's event was also attended by numerous guests from abroad, in particular from Germany, Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other countries.
PROACTIVE, INNOVATIVE and FLEXIBLE FOUNDRIES was the motto of the two days packed with 38 lectures from all areas of foundry technology and metallurgy.
In the opening keynote speeches, WFO President Dr Carsten Kuhlgatz and Josè Javier Gonzalez referred to the major challenges facing the foundry industry worldwide. A key question is how to counter the shortage of skilled workers. WFO has announced the first Young Researchers Award in 2023 and invited the ten best contributions to Düsseldorf to GIFA 2023 and selected the winners foundry-planet.com - B2B Portal: Successful WFO Young Researcher Award during GIFA 2023. The second edition of the Young Researchers Award will take place in 2024, culminating in the awarding of the winners at the 75th World Foundry Congress in Deyang, China. The long and difficult road to decarbonisation of the foundry industry was outlined by Manuel Bosse of the German BDG. The expert for climate and environmental issues in the association was able to explain with many examples, graphics and tables that the path to climate neutrality is possible but that great efforts are necessary. For more information, please contact Manuel Bosse, BDG-Service GmbH.
Dirk Howe and Dr Georg Geier from the German Siempelkamp Gießerei GmbH from Krefeld in Germany are also welcome guests in Portoroz. In their presentation "Transformation in iron foundries in Europe - key to technical and economic success", they address the major challenges facing the industry in our days, which particularly affects energy-intensive industries. But that is not the only challenge, because the shortage of skilled workers, the European regulatory orgies and general bureaucracy are in no way inferior.
For foundries, there would be no blueprint for coping with the many issues, but for the path from tradition to transformation, one thing above all helps: authenticity! This involves finding one's own position in the market and, above all, talking about the fascination and importance of the discipline of casting. Many people are not even aware that without foundries the transformation, decarbonisation, mobility and climate-neutral development would not be possible.
Many current topics, interesting lectures and a lot of fun networking in the Mediterranean environment made the Foundry Conference an unforgettable experience.
Good luck until 2024!
