African Fusion August 2015

SAIW Member profile: Hydra-Arc SAIW bulletin boar

IIW Annual Assembly and Conference: Helsinki, 2015

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

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.

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

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,

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August 2015

AFRICAN FUSION