Editorial—Special Issue on Functional Surfaces: Manufacturing, Measuring, and Performance

Abstract

Abstract Surface treatments are intimately linked to mitigating or avoiding failures due to fatigue, corrosion, and wear. In addition, the advent of new challenges in the industry—mainly associated with an enhanced sustainability of industrial processes—makes surface engineering a critical scientific field. Controlling the superficial and subsuperficial aspects of integrity is crucial in keeping mechanical components at the allowed level of energy consumption. Hence, designing functional surfaces means examining more than just the operating surface processes to get an overview of the whole chain of inputs/outputs. It has been an absolute pleasure to be guest editors for ASTM International’s Materials Performance and Characterization Special Issue on Functional Surfaces: Manufacturing, Measuring, and Performance. The call for papers was based on the investigations presented at Symposium T of XX B-MRS Meeting in Iguassu Falls, Brazil, from September 25–29, 2022. In the symposium, four invited lectures, 12 oral presentations, and 11 posters were presented to the conference attendees. From this total, seven manuscripts were revised for the Special Issue. The other two papers are from the same meeting after we called through other symposia on surface processing. The papers herein cover relevant topics on surface engineering. The first two focus on plasma technology applied to structural steel to increase its tribological and corrosion behaviors and to a polymer for a microfluidic application. Furthermore, we can find an investigation into diamond-like carbon coatings applied to the automotive industry. Additive manufacturing is another presented technology, and the effect of laser on additive manufacturing was investigated in a fourth manuscript. Another case is the plasma transferred arc, which investigated the incorporation of intermetallic for exposure at high temperatures. Next, we have a pair of two papers using double-pack cementation, incorporating the effect of metallic elements or boron into their performances. Following that is one paper about the high-velocity oxygen fuel process using metallic alloys, and the final paper is about developing the gas tungsten arc welding technique through flux-core-double-wire, enhancing the wear performance through hard carbides. We sincerely thank the authors and reviewers for their hard work and dedication. We wholeheartedly thank the ASTM staff for dealing with the issues of publishing an outstanding journal. We hope that all papers contribute to the state-of-art of the surface engineering field. Professor Giuseppe Pintaude Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil Professor Ana Sofia C. M. d’Oliveira Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil Professor André P. Tschiptschin Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Dr. Filipe Fernandes Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), Porto, Portugal