IIW History 1990-2015

advances to an attentive and expectant audience. Some of the advances included the design of a welder gun to increase welder comfort and ergonomic chairs that were designed for postural stabilisation when working in difficult access positions such as overhead welding. The increasing use of robotisation to increase productivity also served to make life for the welder much easier and to counter the shortfall in the occupation rates for welders that had previously been declining significantly. 41 In 2008 some Member Societies asked, via their delegates on C-VIII, for a means of supporting the welding industry and the inspection and insurance organisations in the identification of criteria for risk assessment and management. Costa and Lundin were to respond to these requests by producing a definitive document on the Health and Safety Risks in Welding at the IIW Annual Conference in Chennai, India in 2011. 42 One of the other considered routes for advising the welding public and industry involved the issue of guidelines through ISOTechnical Reports. The process of translating the work of C-VIII into the form of international standards and technical reports, though, was inevitably subject to headwinds due to consequential delays in their approval before final publication. Instances of this included the draft ISO TR Health and safety aspects of welding – Non-consumable thoriated tungsten electrodes , a publication that still had not seen the light of day by the year 2011. The other instance was the ballot for the draft ISO TR Health and safety aspects of welding – Arc welding: Fume components related to welding processes and base metals that was also delayed since it failed to receive sufficient votes at ballot because of perceived conflict with ISO 15011-4. The thoriated tungsten electrode ISO TR document was left to wither on the vine for many years until it was eventually decided to publish this, as an IIW best practice document instead, at the Essen, Germany meeting of C-VIII in September 2013. Consequently, the Health and safety aspects of welding – Arc welding document required further revision and approval through a new ballot process and it was published after much delay as an ISO Technical Report, ISO TR 13392, in 2014. At the same time, a working draft of ISO TR Health and safety in welding – Guidance to risk assessment of welding fabrication activities also underwent the tortuous process of review and further approval as the process entered its third year. This work was headed by Mr Chris Abert (Switzerland) who devoted considerable time and effort to developing these guidelines and in the issue of the final Technical Report. Like ISO 13392 it was then finally published as ISO TR 18786 Health and safety in welding – Guideline to risk assessment of welding fabrication activities in 2014. 43

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