Front cover story:
Efficient welding repairs in the cement industry
This article by Jürgen Tuchtfeld, Thomas Assiom and Issam Chiguer of voestalpine Böhler Welding, UTP Maintenance, describes welding applications for the cement industry, where hardfacing applications of highly stressed components as well as repair welding of broken parts are part of the daily routine. Click here to download the pdf.
Sean's comment
In his African Fusion comment for August, Sean Blake highlights the importance of industry projects and urges Government and its state-owned enterprises to release new projects so that our economy might recover.
Now that the municipal elections are behind us, we can all look forward and renew our collective efforts to better support industry and small businesses. Most importantly, we hope that industry projects will be released that might help our economy to recover. South Africa is in need of new base-load power plants – coal, nuclear or both – to increase capacity and replace aging and inefficient plants. We hope that government sees the need to move urgently towards creating clarity on the direction we are going to be taking to meet these needs.
If we are going down the nuclear route, it will change the face of industry, with many people requiring training to nuclear standards and protocols. We see a long path to upskilling our people to this level, but South African’s have always managed to make the most of challenges in the past. These things cannot be rushed, though, and the sooner we start the better.
Industry is the backbone of our economy and SAIW, along with our sister institutes and organisations, sees its role as supporting and advancing the interests of industry. Much work is being done to promote fair competition and the introduction of tariffs to protect local industry, most notably the local steel manufacturing industry. We are currently engaged in an initiative around mandatory standards and are working with a broad spectrum of stakeholders on the required standards for welding consumables. We all agree on the need to ensure that products entering the country are on a par with respect to quality and safety to those locally manufactured. Such regulations are necessary to ensure that competition is fair and that our own fabricators are not being disadvantaged by poor quality and/or heavily subsidised imports.
The railway rejuvenation programme remains encouraging and the second visit by our Duisburg-based partners, GSI-SLV, to certify South African railway component fabricators to EN 15085 is imminent. Transnet Engineering’s Durban facility has already been certified to EN 15085-2 level CL1 and we look forward to the Koedoespoort facilities also being certified following the upcoming audit. A number of other component manufacturers are also being visited during this visit.
During a recent trip to Europe I visited the Alstom bogey manufacturing facility that was busy building the initial bogeys for the PRASA project. It is a world-class facility with all the necessary process and certifications in place. What they do was eye opening, but I am sure that South African manufacturers can emulate these standards. Manufacturers that wish to benefit from the Transnet and PRASA locomotive and passenger train-building programmes need to adopt EN 15085 railway welding standards in order to participate. We look forward to hearing from interested companies.
Congratulations are again due to Jaco van Deventer, SAIW’s Young Welder of the Year, who performed excellently in the Chinese Welding Society’s Arc Cup. SAIW is working closely with WorldSkills and other organisations to promote the development of our youth and improve the quality of welding education in our colleges to support the development of our industry. We are pleased that a world-class welding curriculum is being adopted as the national standard for training welding personnel. These initiatives will raise standards and the status of welding as a career – and Jaco is a great role model in this regard.
Our annual opportunity to network and celebrate success, the SAIW Annual Dinner and Awards is taking place on September 23. I hope to see you all there.
Sean Blake
Download Sean's comment here in PDF format.
African Fusion: August 2016
Opening African Fusion for the third quarter of 2016 SAIW executive director Sean Blake shares experiences of his visit to France, where he toured the Chalon Saint-Marcel manufacturing plant of Areva Heavy Equipment before visiting Alstom Transport in Le Creusot.
The SAIW member profile comes from Stainless Precision Engineering (SPE). We visit the company’s Roodepoort facilities and talk to Reginald Diedericks about ISO 3834 quality accreditation and its EN 15085 and railway aspirations.
Other SAIW news includes: the July graduation dinner at which another 90-odd new welding professionals graduated; an interview with SAINT’s Keith Cain about advancing NDT as a profession in South Africa; and another success for young welder, Jaco van Deventer, this time in China.
The technical paper is from the July IIW conference in Melbourne. South African academics PGH Pistorius and KJ Kruger report on an investigation into the graphitisation effects of plain carbon steels that have been in high temperature service for many years.
Our industry section includes articles from Lincoln Electric, about its new Rapid-XTM welding process technology; Afrox that, in partnership with upliftment organisations, POPUP, has established and equipped a 12-bay welding school in Soshanguve; Renttech, we talk to Jannie Bronkhorst about modern tank farm construction using EGW and AGW processes; ESAB South Africa and its new Rebel™ multi-process welding machine, which will be launched into South Africa at Electra Mining; and we talk to Ragnar Tonnessen about ABB’s latest welding robot, the IRB 1660ID.
Yaskawa is featured on our Today’s technology page with its new high-speed spot welding system, build around the new 7-axis VS100 compact robot.
For those of you that have not yet booked, remember the SAIW Annual Dinner is taking place on September 23. Send Rencia an email if you are interested: rencia.grundlingh@saiw.co.za
I hope to see you there.
Yours
Peter