A wide variety of coating methods and materials are available for different coating applications with a common purpose of protecting a part or structure exposed to mechanical or chemical damage. A benefit of this protective function is to decrease manufacturing cost since fabrication of new parts is not needed. Available coating materials include hard and stiff metallic alloys, ceramics, bio-glasses, polymers, and engineered plastic materials, giving designers a variety freedom of choices for durable protection. To date, numerous processes such as physical/chemical vapor deposition, micro-arc oxidation, sol–gel, thermal spraying, and electrodeposition processes have been introduced and investigated. Although each of these processes provides advantages, there are always drawbacks limiting their application. However, there are many solutions to overcome deficiencies of coating techniques by using the benefits of each process in a multi-method coating. In this article, these coating methods are categorized, and compared. By developing more advanced coating techniques and materials it is possible to enhance the qualities of protection in the future.

Functional surfaces are of paramount engineering importance for various applications. The purpose of this review is to present counter-intuitive methods of fabrication based upon damage or instabilities for creating value-added surface functions.

A wide variety of coating methods and materials are available for different applications while the common purpose of all of them is protecting a part or structure exposed to mechanical or chemical damage. Decreased manufacturing cost is another important advantage of having a coating layer on substrate materials when there is a need for a high-performance and expensive material on the exposed surfaces of a part. In such cases, the part body may be manufactured out of less expensive materials and coated by the desired expensive material only at the exposed surfaces. Laser-assisted processes, such as laser cutting, laser welding, laser-assisted coating, etc. are a revolutionary set of processes in fabricating mechanical parts using a laser as the heat source. Laser-based processes have also been employed to create material deposition on selected areas to provide a protective layer. Depending on the deposited materials, these protective layers can serve to enhance corrosion and wear resistance, heat transfer, and mechanical behavior of substrates. To date, numerous laser-assisted processes have been introduced and investigated. Although each of these processes provides advantages, there are always drawbacks limiting their applications. In this article, laser-assisted coating methods are categorized, and a comparative study of these techniques is presented. It is likely to see higher qualities of protection by evolving more advanced techniques and materials in the future.

In the precision thermoforming process, one of the main drawbacks occurs in the profile deviation of the produced part. In this study, the effect of different thermoforming process parameters on the mold replicability of a high impact polystyrene container produced by vacuum forming and drape forming processes has been experimentally and numerically investigated. According to experimental results, in the drape forming process, when the initial sheet thickness increases, the part will have higher mold replicability, whereas in the vacuum forming process, by increasing the initial sheet thickness, the mold replicability increases and reaches its peak, then decreases. The results also indicate that both temperature and vacuum pressure exhibit the most significant effect on mold replicability of the part. Furthermore, the finite element method is utilized by the implementation of a fully thermomechanically coupled hyperviscoelastic constitutive model in ABAQUS 6.13. By using this material model, it is possible to compare the sensitivity of the output (mold replicability of the part) to the changes in the range of the process parameters. The simulation results verified by the experimental data and the hyperviscoelastic model showed to be an outstanding and stable platform for the process simulation.