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With each year that passes the world output of technical literature increases, making it ever more difficult to locate all significant information on any given subject. The continuance of this trend will lead to greater demands upon information services and plans must, therefore, be prepared for their future expansion. To be both realistic and effective, such plans must be based upon extensive fundamental knowledge, including quantitative data, on the use which scientists make of literature and information facilities.

The Institution of Chemical Engineers sponsored this series of lectures on the information programmes of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Engineers Joint Council, and other organizations of interest to those in science and technology. The Institution has been interested in these developments and wants to assess what role it should play in the processing of technical information. From the trends of these organizations and from the developments in equipment and microforms patterns are emerging which will help the information officer in his work.

The aim of this paper is to study the corrosion protection behavior of water‐borne inorganic zinc‐rich coatings based on potassium silicate/nanosilica developed with various zinc and micaceous iron oxide (MIO) contents during cathodic protection stage.

The formulated coatings were applied on carbon steel panels and were subjected to electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and free corrosion potential measurements for characterization of corrosion protection behavior. Also atomic force microscopy (AFM) and optical microscopy were used to investigate the surface topography of coatings.

All of the coatings preserved the cathodic protection ability throughout 75 days of exposure to 3.5% NaCl solution. Supporting results of electrochemical tests and microscopic observations revealed that replacement of zinc by MIO particles reduced both the rate of reactivity and the duration of cathodic protection of inorganic zinc‐rich coatings. It was observed that the coatings demonstrated a reactivation step after a dry‐wet cycle implying that cyclic immersion can change the overall duration of cathodic protection stage.

The paper describes formulation and investigation of corrosion protection behavior of an environmentally friendly zero‐VOC coating as well as providing an insight into EIS of zinc‐rich coatings.

Technology competencies (TC) and human resources (HR) play a vital role in enhancing productivity in any industry. Yet the significance and interplay of these two factors in developing economies such as Uganda that are kick-starting oil exploration is not clear. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), the underlying relationship between technology, human resources and productivity in the petroleum industry is established.

To examine the interrelationship among the independent factors (TC and HR) and the dependent factor (productivity), a questionnaire was used to collect data from respondents in Uganda. All the targeted respondents come from the oil exploration side of the industry in Uganda. SEM, a multivariate statistical analysis technique, was applied to analyze the underlying relationships among variables.

The findings suggest that TC and HR positively and significantly influence the petroleum industry productivity (PI). Both TC and HR explain a 32% variation of the observed improvement in productivity. The relationship between the independent variables (TC and HR) and dependent variable (PI) is summarized using the equation ΔPI = 0.36 TC + 0.25 HR, with TC having a more significant effect on PI than HR.

The study thus proposes to governments and oil companies in resource constrained environments that adoption of advanced technologies in oil exploration plays a relatively much bigger role and has an overarching impact on productivity especially in countries with small scale production, or in hostile environments or with unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs.

For developing economies with fewer resources that often face economic tradeoffs, the study examines the significance of TC and HR development in expanding the oil and gas sectors. This work, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is among the few studies that have examined the impact and the interplay of TC and HR on the productivity of emerging oil industries in developing economies such as Uganda.

Elsewhere a survey has been reported of the use of the serials in the Science Museum Library. In brief this showed that where the Science Museum Library's copy of a serial was frequently used, this serial was widely held, and that the converse was true. In fact it appears that the use of the Science Museum's copy of a periodical is a rough measure of the national loan use of library copies.

European projects from a wide list of subjects are sharing and promoting good practice in knowledge development but there appears to be opportunities to exploit the findings of these projects more effectively, especially relating to sustainability issues, in the implementation and development of robust curricula within higher education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

A detailed description will be given of an example of a partnership between several universities from Sweden, France, Romania, and Lebanon related to a high-profile industry area: oil and gas. This partnership was created within a European Project carried out during the 2015–2018 period. The importance of this project is focused on how energy issues play an important role in the global development of industrial and underdeveloped countries. Energy issues are commonly accompanied with the challenging trade-off of energy production and environmental sustainability. The research project evaluates the creation and delivery of a new curriculum at the Lebanese universities based upon the joint effort and support of the European partners of the Project Consortium.

The overall aim of the project was to promote academic excellence through an academic network and by joint research, education, and exchange of experience, but also knowledge that has led to the high-quality curriculum. It is expected that this will contribute in the sustainable development of the Lebanese higher educational system. The project is in perfect alignment with the EU Commission’s action aiming to deepen the knowledge of extraction technologies and practices of unconventional gas and oil while minimizing potential health and environmental risks. The project succeeded in the delivery and the transfer of specific knowledge, through a more effective curriculum, for future educators and offers students a high-quality educational experience preparing them for the oil and gas industry.

The implementation of life cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprinting represents an important professional and research opportunity for chemical engineers, but this is not broadly reflected in chemical engineering curricula worldwide. This paper aims to present the implementation of a coursework that is easy to apply, free of cost, valid worldwide and flexible enough to cover such holistic topics.

An analysis of chemical engineering curricula worldwide, a literature review and the implementation of a coursework case study are detailed. The latter combines practical exercises using free LCA software, oral presentations and debates.

The coursework goes beyond the calculation of results, giving the students key transferable skills to increase their employability, such as the capacity to negotiate/discuss in groups, software learning and development of critical thinking. The course is affordable and flexible, enabling adaptation to different sectors and engineering schools. One limitation is the challenge of ensuring robustness and consistency in marking, but this has been already improved with a more explicit rubric. The feedback of the students confirms these findings, including the learning of transferable skills as the major advantage.

This paper addresses, for the first time, the current state of “life cycle thinking” teaching in the curricula of the top 25 chemical engineering schools worldwide, a literature review of previous experience and a description of a novel coursework taking a theoretical and practical approach to LCA, carbon footprinting and socio-economic sustainability via a free software and a comprehensive range of didactic activities.

EEVL, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, is a gateway to engineering information on the Internet. After a brief outline of the need for such a gateway and the background to the EEVL project, this article looks at certain similarities and differences in the development of EEVL and various other subject based information gateways (SBIGs) such as ADAM, SOSIG, and OMNI, and similar services such as BUBL. EEVL’s present situation and future prospects are outlined.

The purpose of this study is to propose the generalised integral transform technique to investigate the natural convection behaviour in a vertical cylinder under different boundary conditions, adiabatic and isothermal walls and various aspect ratios.

GITT was used to investigate the steady-state natural convection behaviour in a vertical cylinder with internal uniformed heat generation. The governing equations of natural convection were transferred to a set of ordinary differential equations by using the GITT methodology. The coefficients of the ODEs were determined by the integration of the eigenfunction of the auxiliary eigenvalue problems in the present natural convection problem. The ordinary differential equations were solved numerically by using the DBVPFD subroutine from the IMSL numerical library. The convergence was achieved reasonably by using low truncation orders.

GITT is a powerful computational tool to explain the convection phenomena in the cylindrical cavity. The convergence analysis shows that the hybrid analytical–numerical technique (GITT) has a good convergence performance in relatively low truncation orders in the stream-function and temperature fields. The effect of the Rayleigh number and aspect ratio on the natural convection behaviour under adiabatic and isothermal boundary conditions has been discussed in detail.

The present hybrid analytical–numerical methodology can be extended to solve various convection problems with more involved nonlinearities. It exhibits potential application to solve the convection problem in the nuclear, oil and gas industries.

The Institute of Offshore Engineering, IOE, was founded at Heriot‐Watt University in Edinburgh in 1972 and from the start the provision of information has been one of its main activities. The first Information Officer was appointed in 1973, at the same time as the first engineers and clerical staff.