Mon, 18 November, 2019
TWI expert, Joanna Nicholas was invited to provide a Keynote address at the 5th NACE Kuwait Corrosion Conference and Exhibition.
The conference and exhibition took place from 5-7 November with a focus on corrosion processes and safety management. Joanna’s presentation covered the role that failure investigation plays in a root cause analysis. She discussed the techniques that can be used in a failure investigation to determine the mode or mechanism of failure and described some of the metallurgical and service related phenomena, which may contribute to the cause of failure. Joanna also emphasised that these are only part of the root cause analysis activity, which can encompass considering procedural change, organisational change and guidelines for future work.
Joanna’s presentation, ‘Failure Analysis – A First Step Towards Root Cause Analysis’ drew on over 70 years of failure investigation experience at TWI, covering both large and small failures.
Joanna provided examples from TWI's extensive history of failure investigations, including some which were from TWI Industrial Members in Kuwait (with permission). These identified the need for technical expertise and particularly the need to involve multi-disciplinary teams in any failure investigations, as failures often include many factors and identifying how the disciplines are interrelated is essential to the process. This was very much a theme within the conference, with other speakers also highlighting the need for technical experts in different fields to join with each other to determine both what has gone wrong, and to identify new solutions to the issues identified.
