Day 1 was mainly dedicated to presentation of recent progress and scientific highlights within the different research areas of the SFI, including presentation from the PhD candidates, Xuezhou Wang: ‘The vacancy diffusion behaviour under the influence of solute trapping in dilute alloys’ (RA2), Andreas Bugten: ‘Influence of B, Sn, Cu and Mn on Spherical Graphite Iron Microstructure’ (RA3), Ingvild Runningen: ‘Flux assisted Wetting of the Al/TiC System’ and Trond Arne Hassel both related to RA4. The first day was rounded off with a presentation by Research manager Frode Rømo, SINTEF Industry, on the topic ‘Circular economy, critical raw materials and value creation in the process industry’. All the presentations was closely followed by an interested and active audience.

Day 2 started with a very enthusiastic and informative presentation of the Catapult Future Materials, by Managing Director Aslaug Hagestad Nag.

We then continued with discussions focusing on ongoing research activities and plans, including feedback and input from the industry partners. The discussion was organized as a group café dialogue. For each group, the participants met with the RA responsible(s), who gave a brief status of the RA activity and plans, followed by discussions. The schedule made it possible for each participant to ‘visit’ three groups. Apart from some logistical challenges in organising the groups, this was a pretty good session with many interesting discussions and valuable input from the partners.

After lunch we had a very nice and interesting visit to Elkem Fiskaa. We are very grateful to our colleagues at Elkem for the very well organised guided tour at the Elkem Fiskaa plant.Impressive program and logistics, and a lot of interesting things to see and learn.