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.
