With excellent creep resistance, good high-temperature microstructural stability and good irradiation resistance, oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) alloys are a class of important alloys that are promising for high-temperature applications. However, plagued by a nerve-wracking fact that the oxide particles tend to aggregate at grain boundary of metal matrix, their improvement effect on the mechanical properties of metal matrix tends to be limited. In this work, we employ a unique in-house synthesized oxide@W core-shell nanopowder as precursor to prepare W-based ODS alloy. After low-temperature sintering and high-energy-rate forging, high-density oxide nanoparticles are dispersed homogeneously within W grains in the prepared alloy, accompanying with the intergranular oxide particles completely disappearing. As a result, our prepared alloy achieves a great enhancement of strength and ductility at room temperature. Our strategy using core-shell powder as precursor to prepare high-performance ODS alloy has potential to be applied to other dispersion-strengthened alloy systems.

Metal borides/borates have been considered promising as oxygen evolution reaction catalysts; however, to date, there is a dearth of evidence of long-term stability at practical current densities. Here we report a phase composition modulation approach to fabricate effective borides/borates-based catalysts. We find that metal borides in-situ formed metal borates are responsible for their high activity. This knowledge prompts us to synthesize NiFe-Boride, and to use it as a templating precursor to form an active NiFe-Borate catalyst. This boride-derived oxide catalyzes oxygen evolution with an overpotential of 167 mV at 10 mA/cm² in 1 M KOH electrolyte and requires a record-low overpotential of 460 mV to maintain water splitting performance for over 400 h at current density of 1 A/cm². We couple the catalyst with CO reduction in an alkaline membrane electrode assembly electrolyser, reporting stable C₂H₄ electrosynthesis at current density 200 mA/cm² for over 80 h.

MOF-derived copper catalysts underwent a surface reconstruction to form a Cu@Cu x O core@shell structure during CO ₂ RR process, which was beneficial for CO ₂ to C ₂ H ₄ conversion, resulting in a 51% FE for C ₂ H ₄ and 70% FE for C ₂₊ products.

The copper (Cu)-catalyzed electrochemical CO₂ reduction provides a route for the synthesis of multicarbon (C₂₊) products. However, the thermodynamically favorable Cu surface (i.e. Cu(111)) energetically favors single-carbon production, leading to low energy efficiency and low production rates for C₂₊ products. Here we introduce in situ copper faceting from electrochemical reduction to enable preferential exposure of Cu(100) facets. During the precatalyst evolution, a phosphate ligand slows the reduction of Cu and assists the generation and co-adsorption of CO and hydroxide ions, steering the surface reconstruction to Cu (100). The resulting Cu catalyst enables current densities of > 500 mA cm⁻² and Faradaic efficiencies of >83% towards C₂₊ products from both CO₂ reduction and CO reduction. When run at 500 mA cm⁻² for 150 hours, the catalyst maintains a 37% full-cell energy efficiency and a 95% single-pass carbon efficiency throughout.

Oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) steels with different contents of zirconium (denoted as 16Cr ODS, 16Cr-0.3Zr ODS and 16Cr-0.6Zr ODS) were fabricated to investigate the effects of Zr on strengthening mechanism of Al-alloyed 16Cr ODS steel. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) results show that the mean grain size of ODS steels could be decreased by Zr addition. Transmission electron microscope (TEM) results indicate that Zr addition could increase the number density but decrease the mean diameter and inter-particle spacing of oxide particles. Furthermore, it is also found that in addition to Y-Al-O nanoparticles, Y-Zr-O oxides with finer size were observed in 16Cr-0.3Zr ODS and 16Cr-0.6Zr ODS steels. These changes in microstructure significantly increase the yield strength (YS) and ultimate tensile strength (UTS) of ODS steels through mechanisms of grain boundary strengthening and dispersion strengthening.