Download or read book Plasma Surface Engineering Research And Its Practical Applications written by Ronghua Wei and published by . This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, research and development (R&D) in plasma surface engineering of materials has intensified worldwide. There are several conferences each year related to this area and the attendees can be found from nearly every corner of the world. The number of publications in scientific periodicals, trade journals and books is increasing exponentially. Because plasma surface engineering is directly related to solving practical engineering problems, R&D is not only conducted at universities or government laboratories, but also by industry. In some areas including hard coatings for cutting tools, decorative or protective coatings for household products such as door knobs or water faucets, nitriding of commercial industrial components, and metallization of polymeric materials for food packaging, plasma engineering has become a mature business with a number of companies worldwide building equipment and providing services. Due to recent rapid expansion in R&D and new technologies emerged in the field, this book aims to provide readers with up-to-date information. Plasma surface engineering is a cross-discipline between plasma science and engineering and materials science and engineering. More specifically, it involves the study of metallurgy, mechanical engineering, surface science, tribology, corrosion science, bioengineering, optics, electrical engineering and electronics. It is difficult to cover all the aspects of plasma surface engineering in one book. Therefore, we focus on four areas: physical vapor deposition (PVD) of hard nitride and nanocomposite coatings, plasma immersion ion implantation and deposition (PIII&D), plasma ion nitriding, and novel plasma processing. In order to provide the most current status in this field, we invited a number of experts worldwide from academia, research institutes and industry to review the status and present the latest research results in the selected areas. In the PVD area, in Chapter 1, Prof. J. Musil and his group review and discuss the latest research in superhard and tough nanocomposite coatings, which have recently become a focal topic for the PVD community. They discuss various groups of nanocomposite coatings of nc-MeN/a-Si3N4, including the well-studied nc-TiN/a-Si3N4, and present the physical mechanisms for the enhanced-hardness of these coatings. They further propose how to enhance the toughness of coatings and to prepare ceramic oxide films at low deposition temperatures (