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SAIW Member profile: Hydra-Arc
11
August 2015
AFRICAN FUSION
SAIW bulletin boar
T
he 68
th
IIW Annual Assembly and
International Conference was
held from June 28 to July 3, 2015
in Helsinki, Finland. Hosted by the
Welding Society of Finland, this year’s
conference title,
‘High strength materi-
als – challenges and applications’
, was
chosen to reflect that design solutions
incorporating high strength steels,
stainless steels, aluminium and other
advanced materials provide consider-
able potential for raw materials and
energy savings, improved performance
and lower costs.
‘Design decisions for fabricated
structures are rarely made based solely
on technical grounds. Safety require-
ments, cost restrictions, structural per-
formance demands, and increasingly,
environmental pressures all contribute
to the decision-making process. The
importance of rawmaterials and energy
efficiency is constantly growing. This has
motivated many industries to perform
total lifecycle cost assessment and envi-
ronmental footprint computations, both
of which now integrally influence design
and purchasing decisions’
, reads the
conference information circular.
RepresentingSouthAfrica inHelsinki
were SAIW president Morris Maroga; ex-
ecutive director, Sean Blake; Herman
Potgieter of SAIWCertification; Pieter Pis-
torius and Riaan Loots of the University
of Pretoria; and recently retiredexecutive
director Jim Guild, who is the current
chairman of the IIW’s International Au-
thorisationBoard (IAB), abody created to
operate International IIW qualification,
certification and authorisation systems.
Sean Blake represents South Africa
on the IAB and several of the techni-
cal committees. He returns to South
Africa with renewed determination to
encourage local fabricators to “raise
their game” with respect to the use of
modern communication technology for
on-line monitoring of quality systems.
“We are also falling beingwhen it comes
to skills,” says Blake. “For South Africa to
IIW Annual Assembly and Conference: Helsinki, 2015
Photographed at the 2015 IIW Assembly and Conference in Helsinki are, from left: Herman Potgieter,
Morris Maroga, Jim Guild, Pieter Pistorius, Sean Blake and Riaan Loots.
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