Recent Applications of Scanning Microscopy in Surface Engineering

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has already become a general analytical tool to observe the surface morphology of various materials and is currently playing a very important role in surface engineering. In this special issue, C. Liu et al. present a review to introduce recent progress and Y. Su et al. introduce their research about the in vitro degradation behavior of Mg-Ca-based alloys with and without coatings. Besides scanning electron microscopy, this special issue contains 5 papers about the recent application of other scanning microscopic techniques. L. Zhang et al. used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to investigate Langmuir monolayers, and X. Fu et al. applied AFM to study the nanoscale characteristics of the nanoindented ferromagnetic shape memory thin film.