Welcome to this autumn edition of your magazine – I do hope you managed to enjoy the summer and got some vacation time.
Although the ICorr year runs from the 1st July to the 31st June each year it is at this time that our activities start to pick up again with branch meetings and other events. It’s exciting to see our Aberdeen and London branches re-starting in person meetings and exploring how we might be able to live-stream them as well for those who cannot attend. On the subject of branches, I’d like to thank everyone in the Northeast area who responded to our call for help with re-energising our branch there. We had numerous great offers and thanks to David Mobbs for coordinating the way forward – I look forward to attending one of the meetings.
On the 11th August we had our quarterly Council Meeting and I’m delighted to say our Institute remains in great shape. Our new cathodic protection courses are proving very popular and our new coatings courses are about to come on-stream.
With the easing of Covid restrictions I’ve been really pleased to attend two in-person events and meet some of our members. At the end of August I attended the opening of a new technology centre dedicated to pipeline pigging at Cokebusters in Chester, and in September I attended
the second day of the Corrosion Science Symposium at the University of Manchester. All the talks were excellent, and I was impressed by the progress being made in surface imaging at the nanoscale and the advances in modelling corrosion mechanisms at the atomic level. Whilst there, it was my privilege to give our UR Evans award in person to Professor Bob Cottis, University of Manchester for 2020 and to Professor Mary Ryan, Imperial College, London, for 2021. I’d like to thank Professor Stuart Lyon for organising a great event and you will be able to read more about the conference in the next edition.
Finally, I’d like to mention our approach to email communications with you. We work very hard to avoid sending you too many emails as we all understand the problem of email overload. Historically we have only sent you emails about events related to your branch activities as they were in-person events. However, since the arrival of Covid we have moved into the world of on-line presentations and live-streaming which means anyone can attend from anywhere in the world – albeit on UK time ! This has proved very popular and, as a result, we have agreed that if a meeting is exclusively an in-person meeting we will continue to send emails only to the relevant branch members. However, if it is an on-line meeting, we will send to all our membership as it may be of interest to a wider audience. We still believe this will be a relatively small number of emails and expect no more than a few each month.
As ever I’d love to hear from you on this or any ICorr topic you have thoughts on.
Until next time,
Bill Hedges, Institute of Corrosion President
Email: president@icorr.org
