Progress made by materials scientists in recent years has greatly helped the field of ultra-precision manufacturing. Ranging from healthcare to electronics components, phenomena such as twinning, dislocation nucleation, and high-pressure phase transformation have helped to exploit plasticity across a wide range of metallic and semiconductor materials. One current problem at the forefront of the healthcare sector that can benefit from these advances is that of bacterial infections in implanted prosthetic devices. The treatment of implant infections is often complicated by the growth of bacterial biofilms on implant surfaces, which form a barrier that effectively protects the infecting organisms from host immune defenses and exogenous antibiotics. Further surgery is usually required to disrupt the biofilm, or to remove the implant altogether to permit antibiotics to clear the infection, incurring considerable cost and healthcare burdens. In this review, we focus on elucidating aspects of bactericidal surfaces inspired by the biological world to inform the design of implant surface treatments that will suppress bacterial colonization. Alongside manufacturing and materials related challenges, the review identifies the most promising natural bactericidal surfaces and provides representative models of their structure, highlighting the importance of the critical slope presented by these surfaces. The scalable production of these complex hierarchical structures on freeform metallic implant surfaces has remained a scientific challenge to date and, as identified by this review, is one of the many 21^st-century puzzles to be addressed by the field of applied physics.

The increasing demands for lightweight design in the transport industry have led to an extensive use of lightweight materials such as aluminium alloys. The forming of aluminium sheets however presents significant challenges due to the low formability and the increased susceptibility to galling. The use of tailored workpieces and controlled die roughness surfaces are common strategies to improve the tribological behaviour, whilst galling is still not well understood. This work is aimed at analysing the interplay between the sheet and tool surface roughness on the friction and galling performance. Different degrees of Electro Discharge Texturing (EDT) textures were generated in AA1050 material strips, and tooling presenting different polishing degrees were prepared. Strip drawing tests were carried out to model the tribological condition and results were corroborated through cup drawing tests. A new galling severity index (GSI) is presented for a quick and quantitative determination of both galling occurrence and severity. The present study underlines the key role of die topography and the potential of die surface functionalization for galling prevention.

Although the effect of surface topography on fatigue life is widely accepted, the underlying role of surface roughness from first principles is still poorly understood. Currently approaches which consider the influence of surface roughness on fatigue life prediction can be broadly classified into surface corrector factors (C_s) and stress concentration factors (K_t). Those approaches describe the surface according to the manufacturing process (machined, grounded…), or using 2D height descriptor parameters (R_a, R_z…). However, these approaches are not able to correctly describe the effect of roughness on the fatigue performance where it is anticipated a richer set of surface descriptors would show correlation. The present work aims to highlight the inherent limitations of the most commonly employed 2D surface measurement and characterization techniques, and provides an insight into the application of 3D areal surface characterization processes including the use of the latest areal surface topography parameters quantifying amplitude, spatial, and hybrid topographical information which is considered to be important for fatigue performance correlation.