Hello everyone, it’s been another busy and productive two months for our ICorr members so I’ll start with a quick review of that. In April the annual Corrosion Engineering Division (CED) working day was held virtually with over 60 participants for the full day. I sat in for the whole meeting which was very successful and provided a good balance of excellent presentations and break-out discussions. Many thanks to Nick Smart, our CED chair, for pulling together another great networking event.
A few days later Caroline Allanach, our Young ICorr chair organised a “Thesis in 3 minutes” on-line event where several young engineers gave enthusiastic talks based on their current work. As you might expect it was a fast-paced event and I was impressed by how all the participants presented so much information, very clearly in such a short time. They all did well and congratulations go to Qingyan Liu from The University of Leeds who won the competition for his talk on the corrosion resistance of alloys in molten nitrate salt environments, to support their use in solar power plants.
In early May, Stephen Tate, VP, and myself, had our regular catch-ups with the leadership of AMPP (the new name for the merged NACE & SSPC societies). Whilst we all recognise and respect that we compete in the area of providing training there are so many areas where we have mutual interest and goals. As an example, we held a joint meeting on Additive Manufacturing recently which was very successful and there are several areas where we are looking to cooperate further.
On the 10th May I was delighted to attend the opening of our new CP training facility at Corrosion Control Services Ltd. (CCSL) offices in Telford, UK – my first official presidential visit since the Covid restrictions. You can read more about this in this issue.
On the subject of training there is a lot happening and one highlight I’d like to mention is that we have agreed to be a founding member of the European Federation of Corrosion’s (EFC) new training course approval scheme. We will be submitting several of our training courses this year which, once approved, will allow us to use the new EFC approval logo when advertising them. Our expectation is that this will allow us to reach a wider audience with our training offer. Many thanks to Trevor Osborne and Brian Wyatt who represented ICorr on the EFC project team and ensured our views formed part of the programme.
One of the many benefits of ICorr membership is that we offer the highest level of professional accreditation with both Chartered Scientist (CSci) from the Science council and Chartered Engineer (CEng) from the Engineering Council. These are prestigious attributes and, as you might expect, there is a high level of quality control and audit that we must adhere to for retaining our license to issue them. In May we had our license review with the Science Council which went very well and the auditor’s recommendation was that we retain our license to issue CSci. This is a great result, and I would like to thank Brenda Peters, Paul Lambert and Douglas Mills for their hard work to ensure all of our procedures and documentation is up to date. On the same day as our review, I was delighted to hear that Brenda has been approved as a Board Member of the Registration Authority of the Science Council – Brenda many congratulations.
In my last column I mentioned that several of you had contacted me with suggestions to update our website and members database. As a result, Stephen Tate (VP), Denise Aldous (ICorr office manager) and Jonathan Phillips (Square One – our website managers) are now working on a proposal to do this which will be presented to the ICorr Council at the next meeting. It will likely be broken into phases spread over several years to ensure that we prioritise the most important things and get them completed in a timely manner. If you have any suggestions for improvements that should be made to our website, please don’t hesitate to contact me at the email below.
Finally, I’d like to mention the great work that Kevin Harold and the board of Correx are doing to improve and deliver the Industrial Coatings Applicator Training Scheme (ICATS). For those of you who may not be familiar with Correx it is an independent company that is owned 100% by ICorr. Despite the difficulties as a result of Covid, Correx has continued to perform well and is working on several exciting opportunities to provide our training overseas.
I do hope all of you are keeping well.
Until next time,
Bill Hedges, Institute of Corrosion President
Email: president@icorr.org
