Research and Design Partnerships Promote Innovation

It’s through these partnerships that ground-breaking discoveries are made, and that moves the needle for our company and for our industry
Sep 13, 2014 11:00 AM ET
Through decades of partnership with post-secondary institutions such as the University of Waterloo, TransCanada's pipeline, oil-and-gas storage facilities and power plants are considered to be among the most technologically advanced in the industry.

For Professor Adrian Gerlich, examining the joining of metals is pretty exciting stuff.

“One of the main reasons welding really excites me is there are so many physical processes going on. The electrical arc generates temperatures that are hotter than the surface of the sun. There’s melting, re-solidification and the transformations of all the grains and phases within the steels,” says Gerlich, who was recently named the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) TransCanada Industrial Research Chair in Welding for Energy Infrastructure at the University of Waterloo. “It’s an immensely complicated process that we mostly take for granted.”

Finding thought leaders such as Gerlich to head up research projects — like the one he’s undertaking with NSERC and TransCanada in his new role — is critical to achieving state-of-the-art innovation. His enthusiasm for studying the microstructural behaviour of weld material has the potential to help shape the future for the pipeline industry in terms of safety, integrity and ability.

Click here to read more...