Dear Colleagues,

Historically speaking, the intensive development and the aspiration of humanity to convert available natural resources into various products and thus meet the needs of modern humankind causes a daily growing range of pressures on all aspects of the environment and thus suppresses ecological awareness as part of social awareness determined by the historical state and degree of social development. The task of every modern society is therefore the introduction of ecological criteria and standards in all spheres of life and their support, especially in the areas of production, transport, culture and politics, in order to protect human health and life on Earth. A significant part of environmental problems can be solved by improving existing or applying modern harmless technologies, while the other part must be solved by changes in menkind's understanding and understanding of the possibilities and needs of living, thus creating a foundation for a reasonable, responsible, sustainable and harmonious relationship between man and the environment. The importance of the application of modern scientific knowledge about materials and their protection technology is represented by an unavoidable set of procedures and methods necessary to achieve a sophisticated way of designing, exploitation and maintenance, while at the same time, generating, understanding and structuring them directs production towards more environmentally friendly production processes and protection systems of materials, and ensures that the exploited material is reused after the recycling process.

Since nowadays corrosion destruction of metallic materials is one of the key factors in economic, safety and environmental issues, which has significantly increased interest in this topic, modern solutions of corrosion reduction should be based on the application of highly effective and environmentally friendly solutions, such as green corrosion inhibitors. Their extreme effectiveness and multifunctionality, in addition to individual application, is a fundamental determinant of other surface protection systems, such as conventional and self-healing coatings, so it is not surprising that the great interest of academic and industrial communities encourages a great amount of scientific research in order to find an inhibitor with a wide application area, which at the same time affects the self-sustainability of protective surface systems. Since such sustainable innovations can generally be broadly ranked from incremental to transformative, with each category having its own typical improvement potential, timescale, technological and operational challenges, global research activities are largely focused on the intensive improvement of such modern systems.

The potential topics are:

• Commercial application of "Rare-Earth" elements as a promising and environmentally friendly representative of next-generation corrosion inhibitors
• Influence of exploitation parameters on the corrosion resistance of aluminum alloys in aviation
• Modification of the surface layers of metal materials by the process of heat treatment in order to achieve greater hardness and corrosion resistance of metallic substrates.
• Recent developments of protection of metal materials obtained by wire and electric arc additive manufacturing (WAAM)
• Encapsulation and integration of lanthanide compounds in a porous anodized passive film.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Biserka Runje
Guest Editor

Dr. Marin Kurtela
Assistant Guest Editor

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• green corrosion inhibitors
• corrosion resistance
• wire and electric arc additive manufacturing
• surface modification of metals
• multifunctional anodized coatings