Combined treatments - a way to improve surface performances

The paper is trying to create a brief overview for the field of surface engineering with particular focus on combined treatments. The concepts of duplex treatments between plasma nitriding and PVD/PACVD coating, PVD coating and ion implantation and laser alloying/dispersing and plasma nitriding are analysed. Structure modification, including production of nano-structured coatings is particularly investigated. Some of the new layers produced by these combined treatments have been already tested under industrial conditions. The results of these tests indicated, for particular applications, an increase of the lifetime of the treated components of up to 70 times in comparison with the same components without surface treatment. Details about these experiments are also presented in the paper.