The launch editorial, written by Yu Zhou of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and Peter Mayr of the Chair of Materials Engineering of Additive Manufacturing at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, argues that joining technology and additive manufacturing are the fundamental enablers of some of humanity’s most ambitious engineering feats. The authors point to the multi-material airframes of next-generation airplanes, where lightweight alloys, titanium, and carbon-fiber composites must be bonded together without compromising strength or fatigue life. They highlight the micro-scale ultrasonic bonding required for the high-density battery packs powering the electric vehicle revolution, where thousands of delicate electrical interconnects must survive years of thermal cycling and vibration. In the medical device industry, specialized laser joining enables the fabrication of biocompatible titanium implants with the precision that surgical applications demand.

Perhaps the most striking example cited in the editorial comes from fusion energy, where dissimilar metal joints, such as connecting tungsten to copper, are crucial for plasma-facing components. Tungsten offers the highest melting point of any metal and can withstand the brutal particle bombardment inside a fusion reactor, while copper provides the thermal conductivity needed to carry heat away to power generation systems. Joining these two materials, whose melting points and thermal expansion behaviors differ dramatically, is one of the defining challenges of fusion engineering, and solving it will require exactly the kind of interdisciplinary joining science that the new journal intends to champion.

According to the editorial, the field is currently witnessing an era in which the development of advanced materials, including high-strength steels, high-entropy alloys, and metal or ceramic matrix composites, must be matched by equally advanced joining processes to unlock their full potential. High-entropy alloys, composed of multiple principal elements in near-equal proportions, offer extraordinary combinations of strength and toughness but defy conventional welding wisdom, because their complex chemistry produces unpredictable behavior in the molten pool during fusion welding. Ceramic matrix composites promise to revolutionize gas turbines and hypersonic vehicles, yet ceramics cannot be welded in the traditional sense at all, demanding entirely new approaches such as brazing with engineered interlayers or transient liquid phase bonding. The synergy between material innovation and joining science, the authors write, such as the use of nanoscale interlayers to mitigate thermal stresses or solid-state bonding to preserve the unique microstructure of additively manufactured parts, represents the new frontier of manufacturing.

The distinction between fusion and solid-state approaches is central to this frontier. Conventional fusion welding melts the materials at the joint, creating a cast microstructure that can be weaker and more defect-prone than the parent material. Solid-state welding techniques, including friction stir welding, diffusion bonding, and ultrasonic joining, never melt the material, instead using heat, pressure, and plastic deformation to create bonds while preserving the carefully engineered microstructures of modern alloys and printed parts. This matters enormously for additively manufactured components, whose as-built microstructures are often precisely what gives them their superior properties; melting them back down at the joint would erase those gains. Nanoscale interlayers, meanwhile, offer a route to manage the residual stresses that accumulate when materials with different thermal expansion coefficients are joined, a problem that grows more severe as engineers combine ever more dissimilar materials in a single structure.

The new journal, launched in 2026 with Zhou and Mayr as its founding editorial voices, is international, open access, and peer reviewed. Its scope encompasses all aspects of welding, joining, and additive manufacturing processes across a wide range of materials, including metals, ceramics, composites, and emerging material systems. The key topics listed in its instructions to authors read like a map of the field’s future: fusion welding, solid-state welding, brazing, soldering, hybrid welding and joining, and surfacing techniques; additive manufacturing of metals, ceramics, composites, and other advanced materials; AI-driven materials and process design; electronic packaging and interconnect technologies; micro- and nano-joining techniques and assembly; metallurgical and materials interactions associated with joining; welding physics; intelligent welding; welding modelling and simulation; structural integrity and performance of welded and additively manufactured components and structures in service; welding and joining in extreme environments such as space, underwater, and radiation settings; and the joining of advanced materials including ceramics, composites, and entropy-driven materials.

Several of these topics signal where the field is heading. AI-driven materials and process design promises to compress development cycles that once took decades, using machine learning to predict weld microstructures, optimize process parameters, and screen candidate filler materials before a single experiment is run. Intelligent welding, in which sensors and adaptive control systems monitor and correct the process in real time, is already transforming industrial practice by catching defects as they form rather than after the fact. Welding in extreme environments, from the vacuum of space, where astronauts must repair structures without the benefit of atmosphere, to the deep sea, where pressure and water complicate every thermal process, to the radiation fields of nuclear and fusion facilities, where robots must do the work humans cannot, pushes joining science into territory where failure is not an option. Electronic packaging and micro-joining, meanwhile, sit at the heart of the semiconductor and battery industries, where joints measured in micrometers determine the reliability of devices that billions of people depend on daily.

Accepted article types at Advanced Materials Joining include Research Articles, Reviews, Perspectives, Research Highlights, and Comments, giving the community multiple channels for sharing both comprehensive studies and rapid observations. The editorial board emphasizes that the journal aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, serving researchers, engineers, and professionals engaged in materials science, manufacturing, mechanical engineering, and related fields. The board members state that they are proud of the journal’s inauguration, which they say illustrates its potential in disseminating cutting-edge research that bridges the development of advanced materials with innovative joining techniques, and they express deep enthusiasm for the journal’s future while upholding the scientific integrity associated with the Springer Nature brand.

The open-access model is presented as essential to the journal’s mission. In a field characterized by rapid technological advancements serving urgent global challenges, the traditional barriers to scientific information can stifle progress, the editorial argues. By ensuring that critical breakthroughs are immediately and freely available to a global audience, the journal seeks to foster a truly collaborative environment in which academic researchers and industry professionals can share significant discoveries and practical insights without delay, thereby amplifying the real-world impact of their work. The timing is significant: as the demand for high-performance, sustainable, and intelligent structures pushes traditional joining methods to their limits, the gap between what materials can do and what joints can withstand has become a genuine bottleneck for the energy transition, electrified transport, and next-generation aerospace.

The editorial closes with an invitation to researchers, practitioners, and students from all corners of the world to contribute their best work to what the editors call a new home for the joining community, declaring that together the community has the opportunity to shape the future of advanced materials joining. For a discipline that has quietly underpinned every major industrial revolution, from the riveted hulls of the steam age to the friction-stir-welded rockets of the commercial space era, the arrival of a dedicated, open, and forward-looking publication venue marks a moment of consolidation and ambition. The first volume’s inaugural article makes the case that the next century of engineering will be decided not only by the materials we invent, but by our ability to join them together reliably, efficiently, and intelligently.

Subject of Research: The launch of the open-access journal Advanced Materials Joining covering welding, joining, and additive manufacturing science for advanced materials.

Article Title: Shaping the future of joining: introducing Advanced Materials Joining

Article References: Zhou, Y., & Mayr, P. (2026). Shaping the future of joining: introducing Advanced Materials Joining. Advanced Materials Joining, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44500-026-00008-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44500-026-00008-x

Keywords: Advanced Materials Joining, welding, joining technology, additive manufacturing, solid-state welding, high-entropy alloys, dissimilar materials, fusion energy, micro-joining, open access journal, Springer Nature, structural integrity

Microjoining, as the authors define it, covers the joining of thin sheets up to 0.5 millimeters thick and fine wires with diameters no greater than one millimeter. The scale is not merely a smaller version of conventional welding. At these dimensions, physics itself changes character. Surface and interfacial effects begin to dominate bulk behavior, capillary forces can overwhelm gravity, and the limited material volume means heat transfer and solidification kinetics behave in ways that defy macroscale intuition. The result is that micro-joints carry thermal stresses and microstructures fundamentally different from their large-scale counterparts, making microjoining a discipline that demands its own scientific foundation rather than a simple downscaling of established practice.

The range of materials involved is striking. Metals remain the workhorses of the field, with stainless steel, titanium and magnesium alloys long favored for their mechanical performance, biocompatibility and cost-effectiveness. Stainless steel has served in surgical implants since the 1920s, but modern demands have pushed far beyond. Shape-memory alloys, particularly nickel-titanium or NiTi, owe their indispensability to reversible martensitic phase transformations that produce the shape memory effect and superelasticity, properties exploited in orthodontic archwires, stents and guidewires. Laser microwelding between NiTi microtubes and platinum-iridium wires has even been used to tailor transformation temperatures for specific device needs. Biodegradable magnesium and zinc alloys, noble metals such as gold, silver and platinum that enhance X-ray visibility, and refractory metals like niobium that serve as biocompatible intermediates round out an expanding metallic palette.

Polymers and composites bring their own advantages, particularly deformability, corrosion resistance and machinability. Laser welding has successfully bonded three-dimensional polymer fabrics for orthopedic applications, achieving reliable fiber-to-fiber joints without surface damage. Researchers have also microjoined polymers to dissimilar materials, as in polyimide-titanium and PETG-stainless steel systems, and integrated metal-coated chips into the inner surfaces of polymer stents. Commercially, the FARAWAVE pulsed field ablation catheter relies on joining metal-ring electrodes to polymer wires, balancing flexible motion with X-ray mapping capability. The looming replacement of PFAS with environmentally sustainable polymers, the authors note, may create new joining challenges as unfamiliar materials enter the production pipeline.

Ceramics present the steepest hurdles. Bioinert oxides and nitrides, bioresorbable calcium phosphates and bioactive glasses are prized for bone and dental restoration, but their high melting points and poor deformability restrict both fusion and solid-state joining at the microscale. Soldering, brazing and adhesive bonding dominate instead. Implantable neural stimulators demonstrate the feasibility of micro-brazing platinum-iridium pins into ceramic substrates, and hermetically packaged neurostimulation devices have been built by co-firing ceramics with platinum tracks, pointing toward a ceramic-rich future for next-generation implantables.

Four families of joining methods have been adapted to the microscale. Fusion welding, the most widely used, employs laser beams, electron beams, plasma arcs or contact-based resistance heating to melt and re-solidify base materials. Laser microwelding leads the field thanks to its high energy density and precise controllability. Yet fusion welding of dissimilar metals reveals the discipline’s central difficulty: when NiTi wires are laser welded to stainless steel, rapid heating and cooling produce uneven mixing and non-equilibrium solidification, filling the fusion zone with brittle intermetallic compounds that cripple joint strength. Resistance microwelding offers an elegant workaround. Using miniature copper-chromium electrodes roughly one millimeter in diameter, researchers have squeezed molten liquid out of the interface entirely, achieving quasi-solid-state direct bonding between NiTi and stainless steel while preserving flexible deformability on one side and superelasticity on the other.

Solid-state welding sidesteps melting altogether, relying on interdiffusion under pressure through friction, ultrasonic vibration or diffusion bonding. Ultrasonic microwelding of thin titanium sheets produces interfacial regions less than five micrometers thick, while vapor foil actuator welding joins NiTi wires to brass sheets without significant alloy intermixing, suppressing intermetallic formation. Brazing and soldering with low-melting-point fillers enable complex configurations, exemplified by furnace micro-brazing of shape-memory alloy wires into honeycomb stent architectures that retain superelastic response, and laser micro-brazing of platinum rings to copper-coated stainless steel wires for interventional devices requiring both radiopacity and signal feedback. Adhesive bonding remains indispensable for assembling thermoplastic microfluidic substrates used in bioanalysis and diagnostics, though surface preparation through plasma cleaning proves critical to joint quality.

Evaluating micro-joints for biomedical service requires far more than simple strength measurements. Digital image correlation has revealed high strain localization around weld nuggets in resistance-welded shape-memory alloy sheets, identifying crack nucleation sites, while scanning electron microscopy enables in-situ testing of wire joints too small for optical strain mapping. Functional performance matters as much as mechanics: arc-welded NiTi wires show markedly increased residual strain during superelastic cycling compared with base material, attributed to grain coarsening and microstructural evolution in the weld zone. Thermomechanical fatigue testing under cyclic martensitic transformations shows welded joints suffer reduced fatigue life, though post-weld heat treatment can homogenize microstructure and restore durability. Corrosion and biocompatibility add further complexity, with studies showing that beneficial alloying element mixing during fusion welding can improve passive film formation, while toxic elements like copper, cobalt and nickel must be rigorously avoided.

The perspective outlines four frontiers for the coming decade. Smart devices such as MEMS sensor-equipped fractional flow reserve guidewires will demand increasingly sophisticated multi-material joining strategies combining soldering, adhesive bonding and fusion welding in a single assembly. Process optimization offers immediate gains, as demonstrated by electromagnetic-field-assisted laser microwelding of NiTi to stainless steel, where induced Lorentz forces drive the liquid fusion zone toward the steel side, limiting brittle iron-titanium phases and boosting tensile strength by 28 percent and ductility by 137 percent. Deeper fundamental understanding will come from in-situ X-ray imaging, smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations applied at microscale resolution. Finally, the authors call for standardized joining and testing protocols, whose current absence limits cross-study comparison and industrial adoption. With human lifespans lengthening and medical technology accelerating, the researchers argue that microjoining stands poised to become a defining enabler of the next generation of reliable, multifunctional biomedical devices.

Subject of Research: Microjoining technologies for the fabrication of biomedical devices

Article Title: Microjoining for biomedical device fabrication: a perspective

Article References: Zhang, K., Zhou, Y. N., & Peng, P. (2026). Microjoining for biomedical device fabrication: a perspective. Advanced Materials Joining, 1(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44500-026-00006-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44500-026-00006-z

Keywords: microjoining, biomedical devices, laser microwelding, shape memory alloys, NiTi, stents, resistance welding, solid-state welding, brazing, biocompatibility, intermetallic compounds, implantable sensors