Component Surfaces: Manufacturing-Morphology-Property Relationships

Abstract

This is a book about component surfaces - to the best of our knowledge, it is the first one that is solely dedicated to this important subject. Machines and apparatuses are bulit from mechanical components, which have to fulfill specific tasks. To make a component work, many issues have to be considered - and many of these are well understood. However, astonishingly, this does not hold for one of the most critical issues: the component’s surface. The surface encloses the component just like the skin encloses the human body. It is through the surface that the component interacts with the environment, which is why the surface is often decisive for the functionality and the life-time of the component. Despite this, the research on component surfaces has been limited to individual aspects for a long time, and a comprehensive approach has been lacking. This is not astonishing, as the hurdles for such an endeavor are high: it is inherently interdisciplinary - various fields of engineering and physics have to interact; it requires a multi-scale approach - the interfacial region is small, but its effects are macroscopic; and, last not least: it requires linking fundamental and applied research. These challenges have been tackled in a coordinated research project funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from 2011 – 2023: the Collaborative Research Center CRC 926 “Microscale Morphology of Component Surfaces (MICOS)”, in which, over the years, more than 100 researchers have co-operated at University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and affiliated institutes. The scientific results from this endeavor have been published in more than 500 scientific papers in journals from different fields of science and engineering. This book aims at giving an overview of these results. We hope that it will be of interest both for scientists and engineers who deal with the influence of surfaces on macroscopic properties of components and who are interested in designing and manufacuring these surfaces in such a way as to obtain desired component properties. This book is a starting point, it is a guide to current research, and it descibes directions for future research. It is still a long way to establishing a comprehensive theory of component surfaces; here, we are only adding a few pieces to this greak work.