March 2012

Welcome to our first edition of African Fusion for the 2012 year, which already seems to have been a hectic one.

The WCNDT conference will be held in Durban from 16 to 20 April, a huge event with 520 papers to be presented in eight parallel sessions and over 120 NDT companies will be exhibiting. In our March issue, therefore, we have made a special effort to focus on NDT. We talk to Harold Jansen about NDT and the Institutes NDT training programmes and we preview just 10 of the presentations from invited guests.

Lincoln Electric, featured on the cover, has a new regional manager for sub-Saharan Africa. We talk to Benoit about his vision for welding in Africa and about Lincoln's global strength in the fabrication of the towers for wind turbines.

Our company profile features Cadcon, a South African born structural steel fabricator that has recently been certified to ISO 3834 part 3 under SAIW Certification's Welding Fabricator Certification scheme. This impressive company now has four workshops and a processing capacity of 400-600 t/month of structural steelwork.

This issues first paper looks at the creep behaviour in the HAZ of welded joints for ferritic-martensitic steels typically used for thermal power plant. The focus is on improving the materials' resistance to Type IV cracking. We also publish a paper about erosion resistant materials suitable for cladding slurry transport pipework in the mining industry.

African Fusion visited both Afrox's special consumables factory in Spartan and the Esab Johannesburg Process Centre in Longmeadow this month, two facilities that are both being  strengthened in anticipation of promising times ahead.

We also visited DCD Rolling Stock, a division of DCD-DORBYL to find out about the fabrication of pressurised rail tank cars for Sasol Solvents.

Until June, may your welding business remain solid.

Regular Features