The Mintweld Summer School will be held from 30 July 2012 to 02 August 2012, at TWI in Cambridge. Please see this link for further details.

"Welding is a highly skilled occupation, but it is not a subject normally associated with high-end mathematics, engineering and computing. But things are about to change as this crucial part of the EU manufacturing sector receives a facelift."

- quote taken from the European Commission Research and Innovation website

Welding is the most common way of joining metals. The welder's job is to take manufactured parts and join them together using molten heat that then cools, forming a firm joint. Welding is normally a smooth process, but if the parts don't join perfectly, a minor imperfection can sometimes become a major crack which can potentially lead to a disaster. The MINTWELD consortium will look at how the welding process can be improved by using a range of state-of-the-art computer modelling techniques and knowledge gained from industrial experiments.

Dr Hong Dong from the University of Leicester in the UK, Director of MINTWELD, says:

Weaknesses in welded parts can have many disastrous effects including putting lives at risk and harming the economy because of damages and insurance payouts for faulty products. They can also cause environmental catastrophes such as pollution if imperfectly welded parts are used in environmentally sensitive areas such as the ocean. In fact, the new technology developed by MINTWELD will be used for welding deep-sea gas and oil transportation systems, using a new computer modelling approach.

A multi-disciplinary project team has been formed, including leading international researchers from physics, chemistry, materials science, mathematics, mechanical and electrial engineering.

In a recent interview, Dr. Dong said, about the Mintweld collaboration:

Mintweld project partners