Ceramics encompass a broad spectrum of materials and applications, ranging from traditional ceramics, such as refractories, sanitaryware, tiles, and bricks, to advanced or technical ceramics, including materials designed for nuclear, thermomechanical, electronic biomedical, and other high-performance applications. This category also includes ceramic matrix composites, which combine ceramic matrices with reinforcing phases to achieve tailored mechanical, thermal, or functional properties. Across these applications, ceramic processing involves a sequence of critical operations, from raw-material selection and pretreatment to shaping, drying, and sintering. Continuous advances in processing technologies are contributing to improved control over microstructure, composition, energy consumption, and final material performance. Ceramic processing enables the production of commercial products with a wide variety of sizes, shapes, geometries, structural architecture, chemical compositions, and costs. Because the properties of ceramic products are strongly influenced by the characteristics of their raw materials, natural mineral-based ceramic feedstocks generally require carefully controlled processing. Key parameters include chemical and mineralogical composition, purity, particle size, particle-size distribution, morphology, and compositional homogeneity. Appropriate pretreatment and processing are therefore essential to ensure reproducibility and to obtain the desired physical, mechanical, thermal, and functional properties in the final ceramic products.

Within this context, geomaterials constitute an important class of naturally derived resources used in technological and industrial applications. The term broadly refers to economically valuable rocks, minerals, and earth-derived materials that are exploited for engineering, construction, manufacturing, or other technological purposes. Geomaterials generally exclude metals, gemstones, and energy-producing mineral resources. Depending on the context and application, this broad category encompasses materials such as soils, natural rocks, clays, aggregates, and cementitious materials such as concrete.

Cement-based binders are widely used to agglomerate natural aggregates, such as sand and gravel, as well as artificial or lightweight aggregates, to produce cement concrete, a composite geomaterial. The resulting material derives its engineering performance from the interactions among the binder, aggregates, water, and, where applicable, supplementary constituents or reinforcing phases. Fibre-reinforced concretes, high-performance and ultra-high-performance concretes, stabilised or reinforced soils and clays are emerging geomaterials that can be classified as geocomposites, in which two or more constituent materials are combined to achieve properties that cannot be obtained from the individual components alone.

Geomaterials play a fundamental role in modern infrastructure, particularly in building construction, road development, and civil engineering works. A wide range of naturally occurring minerals and rocks are therefore exploited as raw materials, including limestone, clays, feldspars, bentonite, silica-rich materials, barite, gypsum, potash-bearing minerals, perlite, pumice, graphite, and talc. Their suitability for a particular application depends strongly on their geological origin, mineralogical composition, chemical characteristics, particle-size distribution, morphology, and physicochemical properties.

The use of locally available minerals and low-energy processing routes can contribute to reducing the environmental footprint of construction and ceramic materials. From this perspective, advancing the understanding of geomaterials, industrial minerals, and their engineered composites is essential for developing innovative, affordable, and sustainable materials for future infrastructure and building applications.

Conference Chairs :

Dr DEUTOU Juvenal , MIPROMALO, Yaounde, Cameroon

Dr SEREWANE Rosellyne, Faculty of Sciences, University of Bangui, RCA.

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