The eighth version of the International Seminar of the Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Colombia, took place during the past month of July, in Bogotá. This academic event, developed between June and July since 2007, is an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students of the Faculty, other universities and professionals working in industries or government, to be in contact with the more recent advances and developments in different areas of knowledge. This time, ten courses were offered; one of them in the Amazonia campus, covering topics as diverse as raw recovery and advanced separation operations in chemical engineering, electric power applications of high power, multi-criteria analysis, optimization chain areas supply and creation of ubiquitous applications and management of large-scale data.

For the Faculty, the seminar is another chain link in the internationalization strategy offered to our students. Although every year the number of students who may have an international academic experience in any of the universities of Germany, Brazil, France, United States and Italy increased, it is desirable to implement some other strategies in order to increase the coverage. Within this framework, the seminar was designed so that a higher percentage of students can have an international academic experience without having to travel abroad. Thus, the courses are taught by foreign teachers of high academic quality, with a high expertise in the fields they teach. Courses are taught in English preferably, but in some cases have been taught in French or German. This successful experience has grown, and the campus at Bogotá offers the International School, an initiative that also seeks to give the University a greater international recognition on cutting edge topics.

This number, the second of volume 34, includes fourteen articles about different areas of engineering. Topics addressed diverse themes such as the biaxial bending of slender concrete columns and high strength concrete filled tubes under loads short and long term, and the evolution of teaching and assessment methodologies applied to the computer programming course in the National University of Colombia. Despite the diversity, four of them are related to different areas of chemical and environmental engineering. The first one examines the combustion of mixtures of coal and sawdust; the second one presents a model of rapid estimation of the higher heating value of empty palm bunches from other properties of easier determination; the third one presents an application of user models in Matlab^® in the Aspen Plus^® interface with an Excel link; and the fourth one presents the propagation of uncertainty of meteorological data and emission modeling to the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere.

Two other articles correspond to one of the areas of highest interest in recent years, reflected in its constant presence in the most recent number of Ingeniería e Investigación journal: development and evaluation of materials. One of these presents the results of an investigation that aimed to obtain aluminum-silicon coatings on austenitic stainless steel AISI 304 and 317 by means of chemical vapor deposition in a fluidized bed, while the other one corresponds to a performance evaluation of neural artificial sure tests in hydraulically fractured wells. Articles in electrical and electronic engineering, systems engineering, telecommunications and even engineering education may also be found.

I sincerely hope that the articles in this matter will be of interest to all our readers and will feed argument-based discussion of the results presented in them. As on previous occasions, I would like to invite members of the academic community comprised by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia’s Engineering Faculty, to express their opinion on the different topics of this journal; this may be done by the means deemed most convenient, but especially through the journal’s e-mail: revii_bog@unal.edu.co

Eng. Paulo César Narváez Rincón
Full Professor – Chemical and Environmental Department - Engineering Faculty
Director – Ingeniería e Investigación Journal
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá