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Nanostructured coatings and films play an important role in modern surface engineering due to their ability to improve and optimize materials behavior under different external constraints such as high/low temperatures, stress/strain, corrosive/oxidizing atmosphere, electromagnetic fields/fluxes etc., used practically in all industrial fields. Surface modification may be done using any type of materials: polymers, metals, ceramics, composites or hybrids on any type of substrate by different physical, chemical or combined technologies. Thermal characterization methods are one of the most accessible tools to study, model and predict the process parameters required to preserve the nanostructures during thermal treatment of different coatings, develop novel multi-material coating systems, study the complex correlations between material properties vs. synthesis and processing parameters in real environments. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) is often used as a standard method to put in evidence different thermal events such as phase transitions, decomposition, oxidation/reduction, nucleation and growth at the substrate/coating interfaces or in coating materials. The present paper aims to review some examples on how DSC may be used to assess the thermal behavior of coatings using standardization tools and developing novel application fields.

Barium titanate (BT) and barium strontium titanate (BST) are one of the most studied ferroelectric materials with excellent piezoelectric properties, which can be used to stimulate bone formation by applying an electrical field. It is known that this ceramic is biocompatible and can be used for medical applications. New hybrid materials based on BT and collagen and BST and collagen, with potential applications in bone reconstruction, are presented, emphasizing the potential of fabricating 3D structures by integrating hydrothermal synthesis with additive manufacturing. Designing such structures may take advantage of rheological characterization at single-molecule level for some elastic biopolymers like titin and collagen and their molecular dissection into structural motifs that independently contribute to the protein viscoelasticity. Atomic force spectroscopy measurements on synthetic polypeptides showed that a polypeptide chain containing Ig domain modules is protected against rupture at high stretch by Ig domain unfolding, an important mechanism for stress relaxation in titin molecules. This property may be exploited to enhance the tensile strength of a 3D structure by adding specific synthetic polypeptides to the composition of the printing paste.