A variety of industries—information technology, aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and basic and new materials manufacturing—need technological innovations, which attain high-value-added and high-quality products and at the same time environmental consciousness and regulations in a multi-billion-dollar market. The physical, chemical, and electronic properties and performance of basic and new materials as backbone of our society generally depend on their micro/nanostructure, i.e., mainly on the arrangement of internal interfaces such as grain boundaries and interphase boundaries. This is, in particular, the case when the size of related building blocks is reduced to the nanoscale. This book covers interface engineering, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, nanotechnology, and space science in a comprehensive manner and gives an outlook to future developments.

Hans Fecht is chair professor (emeritus) at Ulm University, Germany, and director (emeritus) of the Institute of Functional Nanosystems. He received his PhD in 1984 from the University at Saarbrücken, Germany, and after post-doc positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the California Institute of Technology, USA, he became professor at the University of Augsburg, chair professor at Technical University Berlin and then Ulm. Dr. Fecht has published more than 600 scientific papers and 6 books in the fields of interface science, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, nanotechnology, and space science. He has served as the European editor of a number of journals and organized several international conferences and workshops in the field. An elected fellow and member of the Max Kade Gesellschaft (New York), Dr. Fecht is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Salzburg) and the European Academy of Science (Brussels). While holding several guest professorships in China, Japan, and India, he was awarded the Pioneer of Nanotechnology prize of Deutsche Bank and in 1998 the most prestigious G.W. Leibniz Award from the German Research Foundation DFG.