In the rapid development of science and technology, welding has completed its own transformation successfully. Few people can notice when the process begins and ends. But it did happen in the past. Today, we are facing the fact that welding has developed from a traditional thermal processing technology to a combination of materials, metallurgy, structure, mechanics, electronics and other sciences. What’s more, with the development and progress of related disciplines, new knowledge is constantly integrated in welding.

Analyzing welding, we find that there are more and more obvious characteristics：

1. Welding has become the most popular connection technology.

In today's industrial society, no connection technology has been so widely used in all fields as welding. And the most important reason is its high cost performance ratio.

2. Welding has very high technical content and added value.

Today, as human society enters the 21st century, welding has entered a new stage of development. Many of the latest scientific research achievements, cutting-edge technology and high-tech in the world, such as computer, microelectronics, digital control, information processing, industrial robots, laser technology, etc., have been widely used in the field of welding, which makes the technical content of welding improved unprecedentedly and creates a very high added value in the manufacturing process.

3. Welding has become a key manufacturing technology

As one of the assembly processes, welding is usually arranged in the late or final stage of the manufacturing process, which plays a decisive role in the quality of products. Therefore, welding is regarded as a key manufacturing technology in many industries.

4. Welding has become an inseparable part of modern industry. Many industrial products can not be manufactured without welding technology.

Welding has been deeply integrated into modern industry. Welding was be  used in China's Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project, West-East Gas Transmission Project and Shenzhou Manned Spacecraft. For example, the West-to-East Gas Pipeline with a total length of about 4300 kilometers, has more than 350,000 welded joints in a gas pipeline. And the length of welds on the whole pipeline is at least 15,000 kilometers. It is impossible to complete such a big project without welding.