Surface protection has become an essential step either to protect the weak metal from corrosion, oxidation or wear or decorate the surface with different colours or finish. Many possible ways are there to achieve this. Application of paint coatings is the most trivial and easy to apply and therefore share 75% of the coating market. Annual paint market in India is about 65,000 CR. In the last decade, there has been a tremendous enhancement in the quality of paint coatings. Issues such as eco-friendly paint systems, waterborne or low VOC formulations, functional coatings, smart coatings have become important keywords. Also, there is a huge requirement in various industrial sectors such as automotive, marine and shipping, oil and gas, refineries, petrochemical plants and power plants. Thus it is important to discuss some of these modifications in a two-day conference in the heart of Delhi and come to a better understanding of their selection procedure, application requirements and quality assurance.

There is a parallel coating market, which utilizes sophisticated techniques such as Thermal Spray, Physical Vapour Deposition(PVD) and Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) and Laser Surface Modifications. For many industrial applications, thermal spray has become an important design parameter; much equipment requires hard and thin coatings for long durability. This whole bunch of processing techniques come under Surface Engineering and this conference will also devote a technical session to focus this area.