Abstract
Surface and interface phenomena play important roles in many properties of iron and steel. For instance, the surface of plain carbon steel is easily corroded in air with humidity. In order to improve the surface properties of steel, various kinds of coatings have been developed. Surface analytical techniques are used for characterizing the coatings and surface layers on steel. Typically, glow discharge optical emission spectrometry (GD-OES) is often used for rapidly evaluating the composition and thickness of the coatings. XPS, AES and SIMS are also applied to characterization of thin layers formed on the surface and interface of steel. These techniques provide essential information on enrichment of elements such as the surface segregation and grain boundary segregation. However, systematic experiments have shown that analyzed results are affected by microstructures of iron and steel. Therefore, the surface and interface phenomena should sometimes be investigated by different methods and from different viewpoints, in order to understand all the features of the phenomena. The present paper gives analyzed examples of these surface and interface phenomena analyzed by the surface analytical techniques and other techniques.
