The Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP) met in New Orleans for its annual Conference and Expo.
Part trade show, part technical conference, part meetings of standards committees, and part celebration of the global anti-corrosion community, the 2024 event brought together more than 6000 attendees, close to the pre-pandemic high. The event opened with a Sunday night New Orleans-style gala, including local cuisine and DJ keeping the mood festive. For those who had spent the afternoon setting up their trade show booths, it was a welcome retreat after a long day.
The technical conference spanned nearly five full days and included about a dozen parallel tracks each day, adding up to hundreds of technical presentations on various subjects including new coatings developments, corrosion prevention measures for industrial plants and structures, surface preparation certification programs, and, of course, weathering and corrosion testing. Sean Fowler co-chaired a session on New Technologies in Organic Coatings Development for Reduced Environmental Impact and Enhanced Protection and gave a presentation on “Faster Qualification Testing for SSPC Paint 47.” Q-Lab helped organize and conduct tests in 2019-2020 that served as the basis of an accelerated qualification test for coatings based on fluoropolymer resins. This committee, now part of AMPP, set a goal of developing a qualification test of no more than 4000 hours to differentiate high-performing fluoropolymer-based coatings from others, and a QUV test was able to achieve that goal. At the time, members hoped for an even shorter test of 2000 hours, so Q-Lab ran unexposed replicates of the same coatings, which were left in storage after the 2020 studies were completed, in a UV cycle with more than double the irradiance of the standard test.
“The pass/fail results of the 2000 hour test almost perfectly matched the 4000 hour results from the original study,” Fowler told the audience. “It feels like a lucky break, but we were optimistic going in that we could speed up the test without compromising its accuracy. My hope is that some of the paint companies represented here in the room go back and try to replicate the results. If we can get comparable results from others, we can revise the Paint 47 qualification test to include the new protocol.” More than one attendee expressed interest in repeating these tests on their own specimens.
The exhibition trade show opened with a fascinating keynote address by world-renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku on the future of technology, including artificial intelligence. He noted that A.I. can be a tool for solving corrosion-related problems, as well as many other difficult technical issues, but it cannot replace human ingenuity, creativity, judgment, leadership, and a host of other important human qualities. A.I. combined with robotics may replace repetitive tasks, but he noted how the jobs of most people in the packed ballroom cannot be replaced by machines. He also emphasized the need for “guardrails” to prevent the misuse of A.I., such as for courtroom testimony, because it “doesn’t know right from wrong, truth from fiction, up from down.”
Q-Lab International Sales Manager Isaac Quijano joined Sean at the Q-Lab booth to collect new sales leads, answer customer questions, and chat with friends and colleagues rarely seen face to face. “Trade shows are hard work and expensive, but they can be a key way we maintain customer relationships in this age of electronic communication. At a trade show or conference, customers and suppliers come together as partners and friends,” Sean noted after the show. “That makes work fun.”
