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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
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
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
Steve Maddox