Greetings from the FSA to all our colleagues in the ESA. With the 1st quarter of the new year behind us, the FSA has been continuing efforts on a number of fronts.
The 2017 Fall FSA Meeting was held this past October in Dallas/Ft. Worth, co-located with the Hydraulic Institute’s Annual Fall Conference. Hydraulic Institute (HI) is ‘the largest association of pump industry manufacturer’s in North America…’ with a focus on standards development, expanding knowledge and resources pertaining to pumps and pumping systems and advocating for their industry. HI has been a long-time collaboration partner with the FSA and this felt like an opportunity that was long overdue. It was a great chance to allow the two groups to mingle and participate in common social events and very informative general sessions with excellent presenters. Membership polling indicated very positive feedback, and the FSA will be looking at coordinating more opportunities like this in the future.
The Knowledgebase envisioned and implemented by the Mechanical Seal Division members, has been up and running for almost a year now. Our diagnostics show usage continues to show encouraging growth while significantly growing a potential pool of contacts to whom we can provide new content as it becomes available. At our Fall meeting, there was a lot of discussion about adding more content to the site, starting with our dozens of Sealing Sense articles that have been published over the past 17+ years. The resources were approved, and this is currently being worked on. At our technical committee meetings in April, the other divisions were working on their plans to migrate content to the Knowledgebase this year.
At the division level, the Compression Packing group is nearing completion of the revised Handbook finally! The Gasketing Division released their handbook (1st edition) last year and have been focused (with participation from our ESA colleagues as well) more recently on the development of a spiral wound gasket test which is currently in round robin testing. Henri Azibert presented an update on his project to the American Petroleum Institute at their Fall Refining meeting; there were a lot of questions on the topic and API requested we continue to update on the project as we progress. Our Piping Division and Ducting Division have merged into a single group, the Expansion Joint Division, but there will still be two technical committees working on technical projects specific to each.
At the committee level, things may appear quiet on the Government Affairs front over the last quarter, but the committee is active, evolving its strategy and goals as needed under the current administration(s). We are continuing to monitor the long-term initiatives with the WTO, the US EPA’s regulations on methane and the Canadian ECCC (Environment and Climate Change Canada), providing technical information and education to government regulators and key stakeholders. The US administration is working to roll back environmental regulations put in place by previous administrations, but this is a lengthy process and there have been some recent court decisions slowing this process down (such a fairly recent court decision halting the suspension of the BLM Waste Prevention Rule). There are other drivers pushing to improve the environment, such as the economic benefits and corporate level directives focusing on methane mitigation. This work is a long-term effort that takes patience and focus. It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been working on these initiatives for over 3 years now, with tangible results.
The FSA’s Spring TC meetings was held in April (24-27) in Atlanta with all divisions represented. Our General session will be held at the Hotel William Gray in Montreal, Quebec from October 23-25.
I would also like to acknowledge the participation of our ESA colleagues in the various Go-To Meetings of the various TC’s over this past year. Your input and activity are greatly valued and appreciated, providing much needed insight into the global sealing industry.
Phil Mahoney
Principal Managing Engineer, Subject Matter Expert Services