Jerry Uttrachi, President WA Technology, LLC

Email: Jerry_Uttrachi@NetWelding.com

Capabilities:  Assistance with reduction in shielding gas waste.  Training welders and supervisors on the technical aspects of shielding gas control.  Welding process and consumable assessment, selection and automation.  Welding process training.  Extensive practical experience increasing welding productivity with the  submerged arc welding process in gas and oil transmission pipe, vessel, heavy section weldments etc .

Academic Background/Affiliations: Mr. Uttrachi has a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Science Degree in Management from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).  He is a member of ASME and AWS. He was selected as an AWS Counselor for his leadership and training efforts.  The citation for that award  included the following wording; "- - he has trained a whole generation of salesman, end users and distributors in a wide variety of welding processes and equipment through personnel training and development of training materials." 

Mr. Uttrachi was inaugurated as 2007 President of the American Welding Society at their annual Exhibition in Atlanta Georgia.  The photo left was taken at that ceremony with his "classmate," Harry Ebert (left in photo; who before retiring was chief welding engineer for Exxon) graduated as a Welding Engineer in 1948, then he and Mr. Uttrachi (center)  obtained Masters Degree in the Behavior of Metals at NJIT in the late 1960's. (Harry passed away in February 2014 at the age of 89. In addition to taking several metallurgy courses with Harry, I was on an AWS submerged arc filler metals committee with him. He was always looking out for the small fabricator as well as being careful not to let the filler metals manufactures, get loose standards into the code! I recall one incident where a flux manufacturer wanted to circumvent the fact that this low hydrogen process did not allow baking the tensile specimen that was allowed for 60XX series stick electrodes. Hydrogen, in a recently made test weld, could cause "not so low hydrogen fluxes" to produce weld tensile specimens to form what are called "Fish Eyes" that cause lower than specification elongations. The manufacturers representative asked if it was OK to keep the preheat on overnight if the ~14 pass, multipass weld, required by the specification, was not finished. I was suspicious of the motive but the committee sounded sympathetic to the issue. Then the manufactures representative said, "well suppose it was on a Friday night could the preheat be kept on until Monday!" Harry quickly picked-up on what was he was trying to accomplish and helped stop any preheat being held over even overnight! I quickly supported Harry and said, "just let the technician making the weld earn some overtime!")

Gus Manz (right in above photo), also an NJIT graduate, has numerous patents in the welding field related to the early power supplies for MIG welding and was the inventor of "Hot Wire TIG and MIG Processes."  Gus was a colleague at the Linde Development Laboratories.

Mr. Uttrachi was a Trustee of the AWS Education Foundation for 15 years and Chairman of its Board of Trustees for six.  He has served on numerous  AWS committees including Filler Metal Specification Committees, Technical Papers Committee, Handbook Committees, Marketing, Exhibition & Publication Committee, which he Chaired for 9 years, New Product Development and the Membership Committee. He currently is Chair of the Metric Practice Committee, and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC,) Intellectual Property and Conference Committees.  He is also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and serves as Chair of his local Section.