The Welding Institute

The Welding Institute or TWI Ltd is a large Research and Technology Institute, which focuses on the welding and joining technology. The Welding Institute since 1946 in Great Abington near Cambridge, England, and has several offices around the world. The Welding Institute is a member of the International Institute of Welding.

History

The Welding Institute is a direct descendant of The Institution of Welding Engineers, which was established in traditional British style to life when 20 men were gathered on 26 January 1922 Holborn in London and decided to form an association to acetylene welder and arc - welder together. The formal registration date was the 15th of Februar 1923. Slow growth over the next 10 years saw the membership to 600 with an income of £ 800 a year to grow.

In April 1934, a new organization The Institute of Welding was established to merge the institute with the British Welding Advisory Council. A symposium in the same year on the subject of welding iron and steel was held in conjunction with the Iron and Steel Institute and showed the need for a research program on that was well beyond the capabilities of the Institute sparingly funded. Due to the impending war, the commitment of employees of the Welding Research Council and with the help of modest means from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research ( DSIR ), this program was started in 1937. The Institute had not initially own laboratories but particularly support work in UK universities.

In the late 1940s, a first step was made to transform the status of the Welding Research Council in a Research Association, with which it got access to finance of the DSIR in a 1:1 ratio to the payments received from the industry. At that time, professional institutions with individual members, ie with individuals instead of companies, of which except to operate as research associations, so that the foundation of the British Welding Research Association ( BWRA ) forced the separation from the former institution in 1946.

BWRA bought for £ 3,850 Abington Hall in Cambridge, UK, a plot with several partly dilapidated buildings and started operating under Allan Ramsay Moon as Director of Research. The first welding workshop was set up in an old barn next to the Abington Hall and endurance, research began under Dr. Richard Weck.

BWRA also had a very nice house in London near Exhibition Road (29 Park Crescent ), in which it einrichtete in a metallurgical laboratory, with the former butler's pantry as a polishing room and the former quarters of the coachman as a workshop.

Ramsay Moon left the company after a year because he was disillusioned because he had only received £ 30,000 from the DSIR. It then fell to Dr. Harry Taylor to transform the organization into a viable business. In the 1950s, the organization had enough healthy finances to finally start the construction of purpose-built for the purpose laboratories on the premises at the Abington Hall.

The Institute of Welding had bought a property in London near the Imperial College of Science and Technology. It offered an expanding training program through its School of Welding Technology, and later the school for non-destructive material testing.

In 1957, Richard Weck was director of BWRA and made sure that the organization continued its innovative research and development projects in welding, metallurgy and mechanical engineering. In the 1960s, the BWRA grew significantly in size and scope, especially in the field of education. In general, these activities have been supplemented by those of the Institute of Welding, but it was clear that the industry is better served by merging the two organizations. The successor DSIR, Ministry of Technology, did not object, so that a merger was agreed and a new society - The Welding Institute - was founded on 28 March 1968. The total income of the merged company led to more than £ 1 million sales in the first year.

The direct financial support from government departments became extinct in the 1970s, but The Welding Institute has this financial crisis not only survived, but grew rapidly. The number of personal members of the launched already in 1922, the Association grew in this period to more than 7000 engineers and technicians. Both individual members as well as industrial companies are represented in a Board of Directors directs and oversees the operational and financial activities from The Welding Institute and its Directors.

The friction stir welding was invented and patented by Wayne Thomas on The Welding Institute in 1991 and helped the institute technology into an internationally recognized leadership position outside the oil and gas industry, which formed the focus of recent research projects.

In 2008, The Welding Institute branches had with laboratories and offices in three other locations in the UK ( in Middlesbrough, Port Talbot and Rotherham ) and operating other facilities in the United States, China, Southeast Asia, South America and the Middle East.