excellent contributions to the field of electrets, ferroelectrets and electromechanically active polymers were acknowledged. During the conference banquet, held ...
IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation
Vol. 25, No. 3; June 2018
757
EDITORIAL
Electrets and Related Phenomena The 16th International Symposium on Electrets (ISE 16) was held in Leuven (Belgium) from September 4th till 7th, 2017. It took place in historical buildings of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven). The symposium was followed by an outstanding tutorial based workshop entitled: “Ferroelectric polymers for flexible electronics” held on 7 and 8 September. The symposium and the workshop attracted 100 and 55 participants respectively, from 25 countries of North Africa, North and South-America, Europe and Asia. The symposium started with a welcome party on Sunday, September 3 at the Jubileumzaal, a prestigious hall at the University main building that dates back to 1317, which also served as the location for two poster sessions, technical exhibitions, coffee breaks and luncheons. The nearby Promotiezaal, a spacious auditorium that combines architectural heritage with state-ofthe-art audio-visual facilities, was the stage for 52 plenary lectures as well as the 4 tutorials of the workshop. With the 16th edition of the ISE, the electret community celebrated the 50th anniversary of an ongoing series of successful meetings dedicated to research on the long term charge storage in dielectrics that started in Chicago in 1967. Since then, ISE meetings were held in Miami (USA, 1972), São Carlos (Brazil, 1975), Tokyo (Japan, 1978), Heidelberg (Germany, 1985), Oxford (United Kingdom, 1988), Berlin (Germany, 1991), Paris (France, 1994), Shanghai (China, 1996), Delphi (Greece, 1999), Melbourne (Australia, 2002), Salvador (Brazil, 2005), Tokyo (Japan, 2008), Montpellier (France, 2011) and Baltimore (USA, 2014). The persistent success of these conferences proofs that the research on electrets and related phenomena, from both the fundamental and applied point of view, is still relevant for a variety of electro and opto-active dielectric matters such as charge storage and transport, piezo- and pyroelectric effects and thermally stimulated phenomena. On the other hand, ISE meetings manage to maintain their relevance and attractiveness by widening their scope to recent and emerging topics like organic (flexible) electronics, energy harvesting, often at a mini-scale in wearables, electro-active dielectric elastomers, soft actuators operated by flexible electrodes, electrets made with artificial microstructures, nonvolatile memories, etc.. The scientific program of the ISE 16 addressed these emerging fields of electret research. It consisted of 13 oral and two poster sessions, with a total of 98 contributions distributed over 9 main topics. These topics were: charge related phenomena, bio-electrets, dielectric relaxation spectroscopy, energy harvesting, thermally stimulated phenomena, soft transducers and optical effects, organic electronics, piezo, pyro, ferro-electrets, and piezoelectric phenomena. In the plenary sessions, 13 invited lectures were given by leading scientists along with 39 oral presentations and 4 invited tutorials at the workshop. Professor Reimund Gerhard from the University of Potsdam opened the conference by presenting the Gross Memorial Lecture entitled “But they do move: electret charges on dielectrics enable electromechanical transduction”. With this 5th Bernhard Gross Memorial Award his excellent contributions to the field of electrets, ferroelectrets and electromechanically active polymers were acknowledged. During the conference banquet, held in the Faculty club, which is part of the UNESCO world heritage site Groot Begijnhof, the 2017’s Dilip Das-Gupta award was presented for the best presentation by a young scientist. This prize was shared by Sarah Guerin (Limerick, Ireland) for her oral presentation “First principles design of organic piezoelectric devices”, and Tim Cornelissen (Linköping, Sweden) for his poster contribution “Intermediate polarization states in organic ferroelectrics”. This special issue of IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulations represents a collection of papers which, in most cases, were presented at ISE 16. All contributions have undergone a careful review. They give a view of the state-of-the-art in the field of electret science. It shows that the research on electrets covers many disciplines, such as electrical engineering, materials science, condensed matter physics and chemistry and life sciences. We like to thank sincerely the authors for their co-operation and all reviewers for their valuable comments. We like to extend our thanks to Mrs. Danielle Verachtert, Dr. Tristan Putzeys, Dr. Peter Cornelis and Prof. Siegfried Bauer as members of the organizing committee for their effective and dedicated job in organizing the ISE 16. We further like to thank all
DOI: 10.1109/TDEI.2018.007406
758
J. van Turnhout and M. Wübbenhorst: Editorial - Electrets and Related Phenomena
PhD students from the Soft Matter and Biophysics section for their support. We are also indebted to the KU Leuven for sponsoring the ISE 16 by providing the conference facilities. We are further grateful to Professors Reimund Gerhard, Axel Mellinger, and Francois Henn and other former chairmen and to members of the Scientific Committee for their advice during the preparation of the symposium. Finally, we would like to thank Prof. Paul Lewin, President, Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society, who initiated a discussion on the relevance of “Smart Materials” for IEEE and, Prof. Davide Fabiani, IEEE –DEIS Meetings Chair. We further appreciate the kind co-operation with the former and current TDEI Editor-in-Chief Prof. Reuben Hackam and Prof. Edward Cherney.
Guest Editors: Jan van Turnhout Department Materials Science and Engineering Delft University of Technology The Netherlands Michael Wübbenhorst Laboratory for Soft Matter and Biophysics Department of Physics and Astronomy KU Leuven Belgium
