Editorial for the Special Issue "Cellmat 2016"

Dear Readers of AEM's Special Issue “Cellmat 2016”, The 4th International Conference on Cellular Materials—CELLMAT 2016—was held in December 2016 in Dresden, Germany. The opening lecture of this 3-day conference was given by Denis Weaire, Trinity College of Dublin, Ireland; he gave his very specific view on cellular ceramics under the title “A Mystery Tour through Cellular Materials”. Within three parallel sessions 160 experts from 18 countries discussed about 120 talks, among them seven keynote and 11 invited lectures, and posters were discussed in the evening of the second conference day, while having beer and pretzels. As a good tradition, poster prizes were granted to young researchers. The winners of the first prize are Attila Szlancsik and his science colleagues from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary; their work was entitled “On the elastic gradient of metal matrix syntactic foams”. Tisha Dixit and her science colleagues from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, were awarded the second prize for their work “High porosity open-cell metal foams as extended heat transfer surfaces for space radiative cooling”. Congratulations to our awardees! The topics of last year's conference were related to manufacturing of cellular materials, characterization techniques, their wide spectrum of properties, specific challenges when applied in energy conversion, prosthetics, or in transportation, and basic research was presented with a new view on the description of structural features. Novel applications were introduced and the need for standardization of characterization techniques was pointed out. A cultural highlight during the conference was a walk through the famous historical sites of the city of Dresden in the pre-Christmas time a visit of the Striezelmarkt, one of the most famous Christmas markets in the world, which took place for the 581th time in Dresden. This was followed by the conference dinner at the famous historical restaurant Sophienkeller. A small, but nice, technical exhibition from companies and research networks working in the field of cellular materials and a lab tour to the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM made the CELLMAT 2016 conference perfect. All this would not have been possible without sponsorship and activities from industry, research institutions and academia. Organizational issues were completely and excellent covered by the conference office of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde e. V. (DGM). Thus, in the name of the organizers we express our gratitude to all contributors. We also thank all members of the program committee and the persons in charge from DGM for their support. Finally, we would like to thank all attendees for their contributions and the fruitful discussions! The papers in this issue of Advanced Engineering Materials reflect a small selection of the presentations at CELLMAT 2016; thanks to all authors for their valuable contributions. The next CELLMAT conference will be held in the vicinity of Nuremberg, Germany, in autumn 2018, and we look forward to seeing you there. Olaf Andersen Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials, Dresden, Germany Michael Scheffler Otto-von-Guericke-University, Magdeburg, Germany