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Launch of New United Arab Emirates (UAE) Branch
Welcome
Welcome to the new UAE branch, in a very exciting period in the history of ICorr. We hope that our expanding corrosion community in the UK (and internationally) are all keeping well.
I am most happy to report that the ICorr UAE Branch officially launched on 6th May 2025 with an inaugural general meeting, which was followed up with an excellent technical presentation (online event).
During the AGM, an introduction to the ICorr and its vision for the future was presented.
The ICorr president inaugurated the branch with kind wishes and then set out his expectation for the branch to share knowledge and advance science and engineering in the prevention of corrosion for the public benefit in the Middle East. The ICorr President Dr Yunnan Gao proposed Dr Muhammad Ejaz as the first chairman for the UAE branch and Hooman Takhtechian as its first vice chair. Past ICorr President Stephen Tate seconded the proposal.
A large number of candidates have come forward in response to a branch survey, and a full UAE branch committee will be
formed over the coming months, and additional online events are being planned for later in 2025. Due to current requirements for non-profit institute registration with the chambers of commerce in the UAE, the team is planning to run only online events initially, to confirm the level of interest. The UAE Team will also incorporate expertise from Oman – Emmanuel Marcus, who will be Vice Chair for that section.
We also take this opportunity to welcome Amir Attarchi (above) as our Events Coordinator who previously provided excellent support to the ICorr Aberdeen Branch.
Technical Presentation
The technical presentation by Sarah Bagnall, Director of R-TECH Materials, showcased studies on failure analysis, highlighting an insight into forensic investigation explaining failure mechanisms and prevention. Sarah Bagnall has been involved with over 700 failure investigations and has broad experience with a wide range of engineering components, metallic and non-metallic materials, and industries and has extensive expertise in corrosion of a wide range of materials, particularly for the chemical processing and petrochemical industries.
Over the last 10 years, Sarah has developed specialist expertise in the corrosion and thermal degradation of austenitic stainless steels and is the ICorr presenter for the BSSA stainless steels course; refer to Corrosion Mechanisms in Stainless Steels – Institute of Corrosion. She is also the Chair of the Wales & South-West England branch for the ICorr that launched successfully in 2024.
Sarah strongly emphasised that determining the root cause of plant failures presents an opportunity to learn from the experience and that adopting such a philosophy is critical to the continual improvement of plant safety, performance, availability, and reliability whilst reducing maintenance costs. She added that conducting an effective Root Cause Analysis (RCA) investigation provides an avenue to understand and critically analyse all of the factors that have contributed towards a plant failure and failure mode. Sarah outlined the necessary steps for conducting a successful materials failure analysis with examples and discussed failure mechanisms which were encountered within the oil and gas industry. Several case studies relevant to the energy sector were also presented and discussed.
We do, of course, wish to acknowledge the support provided by ICorr HQ and our President and Past President for the successful start-up of the UAE branch following extensive research and planning. This report and where we are today represent the continuing commitment of the ICorr UAE Team, who bring their wide range of experience and contacts to the table at every meeting.