Wear has, by its very nature, always dominated the interest of engineers and physicists as it represents a material property of enormous practical importance. Even though it is a multidisciplinary phenomenon based on simultaneously occurring mechanical, physical, and chemical processes, recent advances in sophisticated material design, development, and characterization techniques have sustained methodologies to comprehend and predict wear progression. The capacity to systematically and effectively describe wear development is a perspective of great importance to engineers who use materials and mechanical components or who are directly involved with their manufacturing processes.

We seek to attract fundamental research as well as review articles that meet the forefront of this academic area. Our aim is to stimulate the continuing efforts to effectively describe wear-related phenomena in advanced materials (coatings, composites, nanostructured and bioinspired materials, etc.) and manufacturing processes in order to develop sufficient strategies to arrest wear progression and ensure mechanisms and procedures for prolonging the efficiency of such materials. We invite experimental, numerical, and theoretical articles dealing with wear-related aspects and are particularly interested in investigations describing the modalities of wear development and characterization. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Fundamental studies of friction and wear
• Surface properties and contact mechanics
• Modeling of wear phenomena
• Tribological aspects in manufacturing processes
• Tribological aspects in material design
• Wear-protecting coatings
• Artificial joints and implants
• Erosion and corrosion wear phenomena

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/at/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: