Welding, Corrosion and Inspection
Welding Technology and Procedure
Metallurgy for Non-Metallurgists: Alloy Types, Properties and Applications
What metals do under load, heat and attack, for engineers who specify and inspect them without a metallurgy degree.
- Duration
- 5 days
- Contact hours
- 30
- Level
- Foundation
- Fee from
- On enquiry
Overview
Most failures blamed on a material are decisions made earlier: the wrong grade for the service, a heat treatment skipped, a weld that changed the structure nobody checked afterwards. This week gives the engineers who make those decisions enough metallurgy to make them well. It stays practical throughout. Structure, phase and grain are covered because they explain behaviour, not for their own sake, and every property introduced is tied to something a participant has to specify, inspect or explain. By the end somebody should be able to read a material certificate properly, ask a supplier a useful question, and recognise a failure mode from the fracture surface.
Who should attend
Mechanical, maintenance, process and project engineers, inspectors and QA staff, procurement specialists buying materials, and technical managers who sign specifications.
What you will be able to do
- Relate structure and processing to the properties a specification asks for.
- Choose between carbon steel, low alloy, stainless and nickel alloys on the service rather than on habit.
- Read a material test certificate, and know what it does not tell you.
- Recognise the common failure modes from the evidence they leave.
- Anticipate what welding will do to a material before it is welded.
How it is taught
Short input, then work, across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each. Exercises run on situations delegates bring rather than on a case study written for a different organisation. Cohorts are capped so that everybody is asked something.
Available as classroom, live online, in house.
Programme outline
Day 1
Structure and property
- Crystal structure, grains, and why grain size matters
- The iron carbon diagram, read as a working tool
- Strength, ductility, toughness and hardness, and the trades between them
- Tensile, impact and hardness testing, and what each actually measures
Day 2
The alloy families
- Carbon and low alloy steels
- Stainless steels: austenitic, ferritic, martensitic and duplex
- Nickel alloys, and where their cost is justified
- Aluminium, copper and the lighter alloys
Day 3
Heat treatment
- Annealing, normalising, quenching and tempering
- Hardenability, and what it means for section thickness
- Post weld heat treatment, and why codes demand it
- Sensitisation, and the stainless failure it causes
Day 4
Welding metallurgy
- What the heat affected zone becomes
- Dissimilar metal joints
- Hydrogen, hot cracking and cold cracking
- Dilution and consumable choice
Day 5
Degradation and failure
- The corrosion mechanisms in one pass
- Fatigue, creep and embrittlement
- Reading a fracture surface
- Building a case for a root cause rather than naming a culprit
What you leave with
- A material selection rationale for one real application, written down.
- A certificate review checklist.
- A failure mode reference tied to the materials on your own plant.
Dates and fees
| Dates | Location | Format | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 to 27 November 2026 | Cairo, Egypt | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 30 November 2026 to 4 December 2026 | Kampala, Uganda | Classroom | US$1,500 |
| 7 to 11 December 2026 | Maseru, Lesotho | Classroom | R15,000 |
| 14 to 18 December 2026 | Lagos, Nigeria | Classroom | US$1,500 |
Fees are per delegate and cover tuition, all programme materials and the certificate. Travel, accommodation and visas are arranged by the delegate. Registration closes two weeks before a programme starts.
Certificate
A GATI certificate recording what was attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended. Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record.
It records participation. and GATI does not claim one it does not hold.