Dear Colleagues,

The need to preserve the integrity of substrate-coating systems in harsh environments, ranging from high-temperature cutting applications and automotive, medical, and chemical industries to vacuum atmospheres in aerospace devices, has been seen as an object of enormous concern. It has demanded experimental and theoretical investigations as well as advanced developments. Friction and reduction are of vital importance for coated systems. Friction is among the main factors that input heat during high-speed operations, and determines force levels needed in chipping and forming operations.

The use of multifunctional hard, wear-resistant coatings or low-friction coatings—either by the deposition of layered, dispersion-strengthened, or nanocomposite structures—is among the most highly-exploited approaches to improve the performance of manufacturing tools and sliding components. Driven by the necessity to meet the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, this approach significantly contributes to reducing energy consumption in industrial processes.

Multifunctional coatings need to exhibit exceptional tribological properties, cracking resistance, and thermal management, which is often accomplished by complex coating architectures. The design of such tailored multifunctional properties can be enabled by the use of ex situ and in situ techniques to observe wear mechanisms occurring during sliding investigations as well as advanced mechanical characterization techniques.

The goal of this Special Issue is to provide a forum for papers on the following subjects:

• Theoretical and experimental approaches on the wear prevention of protective coatings.
• Computational modelling and simulation of tribocontacts to predict wear and friction of single-component, multilayer, gradient or nanocomposite coatings, from the sub-atomic level to engineering macroscale.
• Instrumented indentation, instrumented scratching, in situ microscopy, and spectroscopy to predict additional mechanical properties of coatings, e.g., fracture toughness, residual stress at room and high temperature.
• High-temperature mechanical testing of coatings.
• Conventional and sophisticated characterization techniques (in situ, AFM, FIB, atom probe tomography, synchrotron X-ray nanodiffraction, micromechanical testing) for the investigation of tribological properties of coatings.
• Wear and friction testing of coated systems to mimic practical service environments.

Prof. Dr. María Cristina Moré Farias
Dr. Polyana Alves Radi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Coatings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• high-temperature mechanical and tribological characterization
• low-friction and wear-resistant coatings
• contact mechanics of coatings
• advanced tribological characterization of coatings
• modeling and simulation of wear and friction of coatings