IIW History 1990-2015

Drews discussed the multi-disciplinary approach ‘Mechatronics’, a term that was to become increasingly familiar within the welding industry and throughout the learning institutions, such as universities, where this new form of scientific endeavour was to achieve greater attention and status. ‘All roads lead to Rome’ and, ultimately, it was the Commissions, Study Groups and Select Committees of IIW that were empowered and faithful to their core values, both sustaining the development of research and then disseminating this information to both developed and emerging countries, in particular the latter to enable progress to be to the benefit of all. Study Groups and Select Committees drew members from a range of different Commissions, and different countries and backgrounds, and enabled cross-fertilisation of ideas from different disciplines and expertise to focus on specific technical challenges or industry sectors. This concept proved very effective and highlighted the value of IIW’s

collaborative global model of operation. For many years the activities of these Working Units came under the broad umbrella of the Scientific and Technical Secretariat and a Technical Committee. With the advent of a new Constitution and the introduction of a more defined planning process in the operations of IIW in 1997, there appeared to be some shortfalls and uncertainties in the communication channels between the Working Units and the Technical Committee. For instance there was some hesitation on which group should have the responsibility of important research activities such as plasma welding, friction stir welding and of course microjoining.As a result Maddox was appointed as a representative on the Technical Committee in an advisory capacity as a link between the two. 25

Steve Maddox

When the group on microjoining first started in 1984, it appeared not to be well attended (the right people were not in the IIW community) and it was officially dissolved in 1991. 26 However, microjoining was to come back into vogue and a Select Committee Research and Development in Micro - and Nano-Joining Technology (SC-MICRO) was re- established many years later in 2011 under the chairmanship of Prof. Norman Zhou (Canada) to provide a unique forum for exchange of knowhow and research developments in micro- and nano-joining technologies. The need for such a committee surfaced at a meeting of the SG-RES, in Istanbul on 13 July 2010 following a paper by Zhou on the state-of-the-art of microjoining and nanojoining processes. Zhou then organised a half-day workshop as part of an SG-RES meeting in 2011 and followed this up with the first International Conference on Nano-joining and Micro-joining , sponsored by IIW, which was subsequently held in Beijing in December 2012 with more than 100 participants from 10 countries. 27 It was so successful that a second International Conference was held in Switzerland in December 2014 with further conferences planned on a biennial basis, the next of which

LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS