Membership voice, May - June 2009
Paul Woollin, TWI's Technology Group Manager of Metallurgy, Corrosion and Surfacing, steps into the role of Product Manager of Group Sponsored Projects this month. Paul has been speaking to Bulletin about how he sees his new role.
Paul's first degree was in Metallurgy and Materials Science and was followed by a PhD on fatigue of nickel superalloys. He came to TWI in 1992 and joined the Materials Department working for a number of years on stainless steels and the effects of welding on corrosion behaviour.
"Group Sponsored Projects (GSPs) or Joint Industry Projects (JIPs), as they are also dubbed, have been a key part of TWI's business for decades. Our role at TWI is to help industry to address long term emerging needs, not just the urgent day-to-day issues. We want to help with new problems that are just around the corner.
Historical issues addressed via GSPs for example relate to assisting companies having problems with toughness and fatigue performance of welds. More recently we've been involved in a lot of sour service issues as our oil and gas Members have been forced to operate in certain regimes. We're currently developing sour fracture toughness and sour fatigue data. In recent years there's been a concentration of GSP work on materials integrity issues related to subsea and deepwater oil and gas developments. For example, the fatigue of steel catenary risers, the pipes that bring oil and gas from the sea bed to the surface in deep water are of critical importance, as is the resistance of subsea structures to hydrogen embrittlement arising from cathodic protection. The consequences of failure in one of these are unimaginable. The critical points in these structures are typically the welds, so TWI's expertise is vital in addressing these issues.
TWI is always looking to assist with what industry needs next. Two themes typically dominate. First we push the emerging joining, inspection and coating technologies that might resolve problems in future, but which clearly have not yet been anticipated. Second we generate test techniques, data and methodologies that will resolve integrity problems already in existence.
Membership benefits come firstly from participating companies pooling their knowledge to resolve a shared concern. The principle is that TWI devises a solution which draws on the best knowledge within the industry and academia and the latest, often bespoke, testing facilities. The second part is that it is a multi-client project so you only pay for part of it, say a tenth if there are 10 sponsors. But of course you get access to the whole of the work.
We have an excellent history of running GSPs and, when the time is right, publishing the results for acceptance by the outside world. We have a long and well defined track record for being able to take the work from the laboratory to the industrial application.
The period of confidentiality for every project is dictated by the sponsors. So if there is a development, in say a joining process or a testing method, which gives you an advantage over the competition, that is yours for as long as you wish to keep it confidential. Usually results are published by consent after a number of years.
The message to our Members, in these challenging economic times, when businesses are seeking to move forward, is that TWI is ideally placed to resolve their technical issues. A lot of them are in the energy business, involved in extracting oil and gas from particularly difficult locations, such as very deep water and from sour and high pressure high temperature wells, or developing alternative energy sources.
We're presently conducting work on welding clad pipe and the effects of reeling pipe used in sour service. A big question is how do you do an engineering critical assessment of a structure with a known flaw in a sour environment?This has been done for years based on fracture toughness in air, but how do you do that for a sour environment? That is a key area for investigation.
Extending the life of offshore wind turbine and biomass/waste combustion plant are current themes, together with deriving the data required to allow exploitation of hydrogen as a fuel for environmentally friendly transport, for which TWI has unique facilities, and handling of supercritical CO2. We have the technical know how to help people address these problems and we have lots of joining, coating and inspection technologies to give Members the competitive advantage, in other words giving better properties at a reduced price."
