Looking at the number of conferences and meetings featuring surface finishing being held currently is a clear sign of things in our industry, and the research effort supporting it, getting back into full swing again, following the Covid pandemic. To note just a few, November of last year saw the 15th EDNANO (International Workshop on Electrodeposited Nanostructures) held in Metz, France, in conjunction with EAST Forum 2023, and reported in the January 2024 issue of Transactions, and the International Conference on Surface Engineering (ICSE2023) in Busan, S. Korea. In March of this year, the 2024 European Pulse Plating Seminar took place in Vienna, as a joint event with EAST Forum 2024, and papers from these conferences will feature in a special issue of the journal later this year. In November the International Union of Surface Finishing’s 4-yearly Interfinish Congress will be held in Hong Kong, organised by the Hong Kong Surface Finishing Society, and we are delighted that the Society has agreed that Transactions will be able to publish an issue featuring papers from that event. This issue is likely to appear early in 2025.
In this current issue we feature the second article in our series Advances in Surface Finishing of Materials, on the scope for electrochemical synthesis and processing of hollow nanospheres and monatomic amorphous metals (MAMs), by Professor Frank Walsh, the inspiration behind the series.
Also included in the contents, roughly half electrochemical and half physical coatings papers, is a study of TiSZ-reinforced hydroxyapatite coatings on magnesium substrate with titanium interlayer by Ayşe Akçay (Afyon Kocatepe University, Turkiye) and colleagues, and a sustainable approach to electroless copper plating processes using biodegradable materials in the bath make-up by S. Jothilakshmi (RMK College of Engineering and Technology, India) et al.
Xiaohong Wang (Southwest Petroleum University, China) and colleagues discuss research into the effect of surface microporous copper coatings on corrosion properties of graphene-reinforced aluminium matrix composites, while the effects of NaH2PO2 concentration and deposition potential on microstructural characteristics and corrosion properties of electrodeposited amorphous Fe–P coatings are described by Shuai Zhang et al. (Dalian Maritime University, China). Seong-Jong Kim’s group at Mokpo National Maritime University, Republic of Korea have studied how hydrogen embrittlement affects the tribo-mechanical properties of TiN-coated aluminium alloys, while the slurry erosion behaviour of AlCoCrFeNi high entropy alloy coatings prepared by atmospheric plasma spraying, is described by N. Noble (Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore, India) and colleagues.
Occasionally (usually very infrequently) in the normally smooth production life of a journal issue something happens to create unacceptable delays. Such an event happened to the March issue of Transactions when, after a normal and satisfactory publication on-line in the first few days of the month, a breakdown in communications occurred to delay printing and mailing of the printed version for several weeks. We’re sorry for any inconvenience to recipients of printed copies of the journal and are in discussion with our colleagues at T and F to ensure such a thing won’t happen again.