More than 250 industry professionals from around the country availed themselves of the opportunity to attend the interactive seminars on Avoiding fatigue in welded fabrications presented by world authority Prof Dr Adolf Hobbacher during the first week of August. The seminars were arranged by the SAIW and took place in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

Seminar content included a basic introduction to fatigue, cause and effect, analysis techniques, design codes and case studies.

Technology manager John du Plessis says the full spectrum of industry was represented at the seminars – fabricators, construction companies, project houses, inspection companies, consulting and design engineers and students. The likes of PBMR, Eskom, Sasol, Transnet and Murray & Roberts all sent representatives.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. “While most agreed that the seminar could have been a day longer, over 90% of those who responded to the post-seminar questionnaire either agreed or strongly agreed that the topic was relevant and that it had highly informative content at an appropriate level of detail,” says John.

Prof Dr Hobbacher said roughly 75% of failures were related to fatigue and that failure investigations usually identified design problems as the root cause of fatigue failures.

Based on the response to the visit by Prof Dr Hobbacher, the SAIW is already planning the next series of seminars, which will be presented by Dr Damian Kotecki, past president of the American Welding Society and for years technical director at Lincoln Electric, next year. Dr Kotecki holds several patents for weld filler metals and is a prolific publisher of welding papers.

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In Johannesburg, the venue for the Hobbacher fatigue seminars had to be shifted to cater for the 127 people who registered.

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Prof Dr Adolf Hobbacher of the University of Applied Sciences in Wilhelmshaven, Germany.