Our last Technology Evening for 2008 was on 8 October 2008 and presented by Paulo Da Silva, Honeywell field solutions regional sales leader on: 'Corrosion monitoring on-line as a process variable'.
Paulo provided the technology and details about online 24/7 corrosion analysis on vessels and pipelines and the results logged and trended on the DCS system providing the following four parameters: general corrosion (uniform) taking place; pitting factor; Stern Geary (Beta) values and the corrosion mechanism indicator.
The benefit of this online monitoring is that if there is a sharp rise in the corrosion or pitting, other process parameters such as temperature that are being logged and trended can be reviewed immediately and a correlation made as to why corrosion is deviating from what is expected and immediate preventive action taken to remedy the situation.
The first activity for 2009 will be our branch AGM on Wednesday 11 February, which will be followed by a braai. Do not miss out on this start to the New Year. Anyone interested in serving on the committee please approach either Paulo de Sousa Gomes or Debbie Scott.
In March our branch will host the SAIMC AGM and all the branches are invited to attend this event.
Our first technology evening for 2009 will only take place on 8 April and will be a presentation by Johan Hamman of DesSoft who will be giving a presentation on smart P&IDs.
Then what happened to Bill Steenberg? Bill has joined ILF Consulting Engineers in Baarn, Switzerland and will be doing a stint in Kazakhstan at the Almaty office working on the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan-China gas pipeline project to Beijing in China. This is why Bill stood down as SAIMC vice-president in September and as SAIMC general secretary in October. There was some delay in getting his visa sorted, which was beneficial, as Bill was able to attend the annual banquet into which he had put a lot of effort with Kessie Coetzee, Debbie Scott and Johan Van Jaarsveldt. Bill finally flew out on Friday 7 November and will be sending regular news on what is happening in that part of the world.
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