WELDING, the fusing of the surfaces of two work pieces to form one is a precise, reliable, cost-effective, and “high-tech” method for joining materials. No other technique is as widely used by manufacturers to join metals and alloys efficiently and to add value to their products. Most of the familiar objects in modern society, from buildings and bridges, to vehicles, computers, and medical devices, could not be produced without the use of welding. Welding today is applied to a wide variety of materials and products, using such advanced technologies as lasers and plasma arcs. The future of welding holds even greater promise as methods are devised for joining dissimilar and non-metallic materials and for creating products of innovative shapes and designs. Developments continued with the invention of laser beam welding, electron beam welding, electromagnetic pulse welding and friction stir welding in the latter half of the century. Today, the science continues to advance. Robot welding is common place in industrial settings and researchers continue to develop new welding methods and gain greater understanding of weld quality.

Surface engineering involves altering the properties of the Surface Phase in order to reduce the degradation over time. This is accomplished by making the surface robust to the environment in which it will be used. A spectrum of topics that represent the diverse nature of the field of surface engineering includes Plating technologies, Nano technologies and Surface engineering. Surface engineering techniques are being used in the automotive, aerospace, missile, power, electronic, biomedical, textile, petroleum, petrochemical, chemical, steel, power, cement, machine tools and construction industries including road surfacing. Surface engineering techniques can be used to develop a wide range of functional properties, including physical, chemical, electrical, electronic, magnetic, mechanical, wear-resistant and corrosion-resistant properties at the required substrate surfaces. Almost all types of materials, including metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites can be coated on similar or dissimilar materials. It is also possible to form coatings of newer materials (e.g., met glass. beta-C3N4), graded deposits, multi-component deposits etc.