The Twelfth International Drying Symposium IDS 2000 was held in the "Lions' Den", Leeuwenhorst, Nordwijkerhout, the Netherlands from 27 to 31 August 2000. The location, a conference hotel near the North Sea coast, provided an excellent range of self- contained facilities that comfortably housed the conference of 396 registrants. This number was the largest ever at an IDS event, but the number was boosted by the relatively large number (62) of Dutch delegates, perhaps encouraged and enabled to attend by living in a small country with first-class internal communications. Interestingly, 70% of all Dutch registrants came from industry, compared with 23% from elsewhere. One suspects that this imbalance also reflects the judgement of industry on the benefits, or the lack of them, of attending a generic science-based conference located at a distance even if there are trade-related exhibits, as in this Symposium. There was a good representation from the strong research schools in Europe, as expected, but almost as many came from Brazil (28) as from France (31), with attendance from the USA slightly less (24). This augurs well for IDS2004, which will be held in Saõ Paulo State, Brazil. Attendance from Asia was light, but IDS2002, being in Beijing, will undoubtedly attract significantly greater numbers of Chinese and Japanese delegates as well as others from the Asian region.

The Symposium introduced a number of innovations that were described by one participant as a "cultural shock". The International Advisory Committee acting as the Conference's Scientific Committee screened all papers other than keynote presentations into three categories; scientific papers, professional and short communications. However, in the end, this subdivision was of little consequence as the symposium was designed around poster presentations, with only a five-minute verbal presentation allocated in one of three parallel sessions. Periods were set aside for delegates to view the posters and at the same time discuss with the presenters their work. Registrants were given a hard copy of the abstracts and a compact disk containing most of the papers themselves, together with a minidisk containing the remaining late papers. Facilities were made available for participants to print hard copy from their disk, but many missed the opportunity to have a full text to hand to follow the very short verbal presentations. Discussion of papers in the open sessions was thus limited. Nevertheless, these various innovations enabled 301 papers to be given in the three full days of the conference, limiting the number of parallel sessions to three, and delegates could return home with only a modest weight increase in their baggage.

Another novel feature of this conference was the holding of a parallel minisyposium on Advances in Paper Dewatering AIPD2000, which contained 4 sessions, with 35 contributions and 3 keynote papers.

The compact disk of the Proceedings of the Symposium IDS2000, edited by P J A M Kerkhof, W J Coumans and G D Mooiweer, is available from Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam (ISBN 0-444-50422-2), and a selection of papers will be reproduced in future issues of "Drying Technology".

When the International Symposia on Drying were started, the Proceedings of the first conference at Montreal in 1978 could be contained in a single, 254-page, hardbound volume with contributions from 61 authors. At that time many papers encompassed fundamental and generic issues such as short-cut methods for calculating drying rates with a concentration- dependent diffusion coefficient, the kinetics of drying microporous materials, the adiabatic drying of hygroscopic materials and the conditions for the observation of a constant-drying rate with wet granular material. At IDS2000, the issues were generally more specific to products, processes and plant. The final keynote paper by Kerkhof, who considered to what extent drying was a fully developed unit operation, brought out an interesting response from van 't Land. Industry, in his opinion, was still satisfied with fairly crude design methods in specifying drying plant. The gulf between the curiosity-driven concerns of drying science and the purpose-driven outlook of drying technology, so often a matter of observation at previous Symposia, appeared as wide as ever. We still need bridge-builders who are able to interpret the significance of our increasingly sophisticated models and experimental techniques in a way that industry is prepared to understand and accept. A generalisation, I admit, and doubtless there are notable exceptions, but there is still a gulf. It does not help that there are still differences in terminology between disciplines, as noted by Kemp, who during the conference described the revision of the British Standard BS 1339 on humidity and dewpoint, a process which involved resolving conflicting norms.

The keynote lectures were particularly well-chosen and covered the range in endeavour from fundamental science to the philosophy of innovation. Prat described recent advances in pore models as a basis for understanding moisture movement in capillary-porous bodies, and noted that moisture can migrate between isolated sites. (Something similar appears to happen in the drying of the softwood at high degrees of pit aspiration). Bahu looked at innovative processing from British experience in encouraging the application of new technology, while Nowak described a particular example of developing the cyclone dryer for industrial use. Menshutina illustrated the development and use of computer-aided databases in drying technology. Bruin provided an overview of drying in the food industry, while Kerkhof gave a state-of-the-art review of drying science that has been referred to earlier.

No attempt will be made here to summarise the poster-papers, or to choose papers of outstanding significance. Regional concerns could be noted, perhaps reflecting funding opportunities. Osmotic drying of fruit and improved processes for and quality aspects of the drying of food materials were strong themes. Almost absent were papers that dealt with the drying of fine chemicals and minerals. A few papers dealt with wood, while pulp and paper technology was considered in the adjunct minisymposium, AIPD2000. One small session was concerned with process control, and a single paper covered data acquisition and control systems in experiments. Six separate sessions were devoted to modelling and simulation, while only one dealt with novel experimental methods. One would have wished to see a more balanced effort between experiment and theory.

The IDS2000 Major Awards, to mark distinguished contribution to various aspects of drying science, technology and engineering, were announced at the Conference Dinner. The following achievements were recognised:

• Excellence in Drying Research (sponsored by Procter & Gamble Co) to Professor M Okazaki, Kyoto Polytechnic College, Japan.
• Excellence in Drying (sponsored by the French Association for Drying in Industry and Agriculture, AFSIA) to Dr O Alves-Filho, Norwegian University of Technology Trondheim, Norway.
• Innovation in Drying (sponsored by NGK Insulators Ltd) to Mr L Genskow, Procter & Gamble Co, USA.
• Innovation in Drying (sponsored by Hosokawa Micron Co) to Professor M Hasatani, Nagoya University, Japan.
• Outstanding Research in Freeze-drying (Professor J Andrieu).

The joint winners of the Marcel Dekker Award for the Best Paper published in Drying Technology over the period 1998-1999 were:

• Hashemi, S J and Douglas, W J M (1999) Through drying of paper from mechanical and chemical pulp blends: transport phenomena behaviour, vol.17 (10), 2183-2217.
• Laurent, S, Couture, F and Roques, M (1999) The use of local thermodynamic path for quality problems during convective drying, vol.17 (7&8), 1327-1345.

All papers, including the keynote lectures, presented at the Advances in Paper Dewatering AIPD2000 Minisymposium were eligible for the Jukka Lehtinen Memorial Prize. The recipients were:

• Professor W J M (Murray) Douglas for a lifetime achievement in fundamental drying research and applying it to the benefit of the pulp and paper industry;
• Thad C Maloney for a fascinating piece of fundamental work that has given new insights on water-fibre interactions by describing how the structure of the fibre-cell wall affects press and dryer dewatering.
• Carl Gustav Berg, who with associates presented two papers on the experimental evaluation of moisture movement in the paper-coating process, for providing a very good insight to a very complex yet important industrial problem.

The Symposium Chairman, Jan Coumans, and the Organising Committee are to be congratulated for arranging a well-ordered Symposium and for not shrinking in making innovations to smooth the presentation of a large number of contributions. We look forward to IDS2002 with all its opportunities for showcasing drying science and technology.