Advanced Techniques for Surface Engineering

Book excerpt: Today's shortages of resources make the search for wear and corrosion resistant materials one of the most important tasks of the next century. Since the surface of a material is the location where any interaction occurs, it is that there the hardest requirements on the material are imposed: to be wear resistant for tools and bearings; to be corrosion resistant for turbine blades and tubes in the petrochemical industry; to be antireflecting for solar cells; to be decorative for architectural panels and to combine several of these properties in other applications. Surface engineering is the general term that incorporates all the techniques by which a surface modification can be accomplished. These techniques include both coating and modification of the surface by ion implantation and laser beam melting. In recent years a continuously growing number of these techniques were developed to the extent that it became more and more difficult to maintain an overlook and to understand which of these highly differentiated techniques might be applied to resolve a given surface engineering problem. A similar development is also occuring for surface characterization techniques. This volume contains contributions from renowned scientists and engineers to the Eurocourse the aim of which was to inform about the various techniques and to give a comprehensive survey of the latest development on this subject.