October 2011

In my ‘Comment' this month, I write about Crown Publications' 25th anniversary in publishing Business to Business magazines and journals, as well as other regular and not so regular works. Throughout this time, Ms Jenny Warwick has been at the helm. As she outlined in her brief speech at the breakfast held at the Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club, she began this undertaking in 1986 when the local economy was not at its strongest. Read more about this event on page 3 of the magazine. We wish our publisher all the best for the forthcoming years and congratulate her on her amazing achievements thus far.

Aside from our ‘Special Report' this month, which is entitled ‘Synthetic adventure' and looks at the development in manmade fabrics and materials used for textiles and clothing, we also have a story, starting on page 7, about modularization of LNG liquefaction plants - (the transition to a mainstream project strategy) by Richard Brookfield, Director, Global LNG & Midstream, Foster Wheeler, and Jeremy Cooke, Project Operations Manager, Business Solutions Group, Foster Wheeler.

Modularization is a construction strategy that was originally developed in the offshore oil industry to enable large amounts of fabrication work to be carried out on land in a safer environment and at considerable cost saving. Modular strategies for onshore projects have subsequently emerged, particularly since the mid-1980s, made possible by developments in heavy lift craneage and other specialist land transportation equipment.

In the corrosion and coatings engineering feature, Ines Melamies writes an interesting case study about a family-owned company, Weber-Formenbau GmbH & Co. KG, in Esslingen, in the south of Germany, which specializes in producing multi-component injection-moulded parts for the automotive, medical and electronics industry. One of its showcase products is a complex, polycarbonate optics, rain/light sensor which they manufacture using an injection moulding process, for a large automotive supplier. Production of the plastic optics (a sensitive component) must, in addition, include both protection in an enclosure, on the one hand, and a cover layer used to adhere to the windshield, on the other.

Our solids handling feature focuses on a new mixing technology enables sinter plant efficiency, while the waste management article is entitled ‘Liquid radioactive wastes treatment: a review' and comes to us from R O Abdel Rahman and H A Ibrahium, both of Hot Laboratory and Waste Management Centre, Atomic Energy Authority of Egypt, Cairo, Egypt; and Yung-Tse Hung, Department of Civil and EnvironmentalEngineering, Cleveland State University, Ohio, USA.

Regular Features