Priorities and Expectations for Surface Engineering: A Personal View

Surface engineering is currently attracting wide attention. The need to engineer surfaces for specific performance requirements has always been present but, until recently, the means available to accomplish this were few. The situation has changed dramatically during the past few decades when the rate, at which new surface modification processes appear, has escalated rapidly. The growth has been driven by synergistic advances in process control, modeling, materials and surface science, and in instrumentation which enables us to closely analyze and observe the surface and the near-surface material in great detail. At this point industrial adaptation of the new processes is lagging somewhat, awaiting maturation of the most promising processes so they can be reliably used in mass production.