Alloying with V and Ti elements effectively improves the strength of WMoTaNb refractory high entropy alloys (RHEAs) at elevated temperatures. However, their effects on the oxidation resistance of WMoTaNb RHEAs are unknown, which is vitally important to their application at high temperatures. In this work, the effect of V and Ti on the oxidation behavior of WMoTaNb RHEA at 1000 °C was investigated using a thermogravimetric system, X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The oxidation of all alloys was found to obey a power law passivating oxidation at the early stage. The addition of V aggravates the volatility of V₂O₅, MoO₃ and WO₃, and leads to disastrous internal oxidation. The addition of Ti reduces the mass gain in forming the full coverage of passivating scale and prolongs the passivation duration of alloys.

Recovery of rare earth from the waste rare earth polishing powder is of great importance to improve the process economics. The current recovery methods result in the generation of large quantities of polluted discharge necessitating waste treatment systems. The present work attempts to extract cerium from rare earth slurry waste by thiourea reducing and hydrochloric acid leaching, towards which central composite technique of the response surface methodology is adopted to design the experiments and to optimize the process conditions to maximize the recovery rate. The effects of four major parameters such as temperature, duration of leaching, dosage of thiourea, and the concentration of HCl were assessed, and the optimal process conditions were identified. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilized to identify the suitable model and to eliminate the insignificant model parameters. The optimized process conditions for maximizing the recovery rate are identified to be a leaching temperature of 90°C, duration of 150 min, thiourea dosage of 0.2 g/g, and HCl concentration of 3.5 mol/l. A recovery of 91.23% could be achieved and validated through repeat experimental runs at the optimized process conditions. The optimized process samples are characterized utilizing XRD to validate the recovery.

The effect of holmium (Ho) addition on the glass-forming ability (GFA) and crystallization behaviors of Zr₅₄Cu₂₉Al₁₀Ni₇ bulk metallic glass (BMGs) were studied by employing differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The characteristic temperatures and activation energies of crystallization were obtained from DSC data. Classical kinetic modes were used to evaluate the crystallization processes of Zr₅₄Cu₂₉Al₁₀Ni₇ and Zr₄₈Cu₂₉Ni₇Al₁₀Ho₆ BMGs. The results showed that Ho addition reduces the activation energy in the original crystallization period of Zr-based BMG and improves the nucleation, which is due to the formation of simpler compounds, such as CuZr₂, Cu₂Ho, and Al₃Zr₅.