With more than 50 years of experience in powder metallurgy (PM) education and research, together with extensive participation in international conferences, Gopal S. Upadhyaya looks back at the history of the world's major PM associations.
Powder metallurgy associations International Institute for the Science of Sintering, Belgrade, Serbia (http://www.iiss.sanu.ac.rs)
The International Institute for the Science of Sintering (IISS) is an exclusive international organization for sintering, whose headquarters is the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Belgrade. The academy is the patron of IISS since November 1973. IISS was founded in 1968, initially as the International Team for Studying Sintering (ITS), with only 16 scientists from 10 countries (France, USA, USSR, Sweden, CSSR, Yugoslavia, Romania, Italy, Germany, and Finland) working under Prof M.M. Ristic, the Secretary of the team, who was a Yugoslavian. During Cold War period, Yugoslavia, being a nonaligned country, was considered to be the ideal place for the scientists from the United States and Western Europe to interact with those of the Soviet Union and East European countries. Thus, the role of IISS has been very timely. The sintering journals have been in existence for 47 years, with its first publication in July 1969 and the recent one in 2015. IISS releases three issues every year at regular intervals. It has three grades of members: honorary, full, and corresponding. The Eleventh World Round Table Conference was scheduled to be held in 2008, but it could not materialize. However, IISS sponsored a substitute International Conference on Sintering, which was held in 2009 at Kiev (Ukraine) under the leadership of Academician V.V. Skorokhod. The dates of the previous World Round Table Conferences (all held in Yugoslavia) are as follows: first: August 1969, Herceg Novi; second: September 1971, Herceg Novi; third: September 1973, Herceg Novi; fourth: September 1977, Dubrovnik; fifth: September 1981, Portorož; sixth: September 1985, Herceg Novi; seventh: August/September 1989, Herceg Novi, eighth: canceled (August 1993); ninth: September 1998, Belgrade; and tenth: September 2002, Belgrade. In addition, IISS has also organized international schools/conferences on sintering in many countries, whose details are as follows: first: 1975, Herceg Novi, Yugoslavia; second: 1979, Warsawa, Poland; third: 1983, New Delhi, India; fourth: 1987, Tokyo, Japan; fifth: 1991, Vancouver, Canada; sixth: 1996, Haikou, China; and seventh: 2000, New Delhi, India.
This article appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of Metal Powder Report.
