Trends in Heat Treatment and Surface Engineering : A Few Examples

Heat treatment has been undergoing rapid changes in recent years. Many if not all of these changes are brought about due to the stringentrestrictions being placed by environmental considerations and increasing cost of power. Surface engineering on the other hand has been assuming steadily increasing importance by virtue of developments in other technologies such as generation of intense laser beams, production and control of widely different ion beams, greater resolutions in scanning probe microscopes etc. The present article attempt to illustrate the trends in these fields through a few examples. The cases discussed are only for illustrating a few of the many trends and are in no way exhaustive