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Metal-dispersed Pd/ZrO2 composites were derived from amorphous Zr65Pd35 alloy and their catalytic behavior for diesel soot combustion was studied. X-ray diffractograms and scanning electron micrographs indicated that mixtures of ZrO2 phase and the dispersed metallic phase were formed in the resulting material after heat treatment at 800 °C in air. The oxidized alloy resulted in the enhanced soot combustion activity. The removal property of catalyst, evaluated as temperature, is almost 100 °C better than that in the non-catalyzed reaction. The combustion processes were observed by in situ high temperature optical microscopy (HTOM) and ex situ electron microscopy with different scales. The secondary soot particle started the combustion at the primary soot near catalyst. Upon heating to higher temperature between 570 °C and 590 °C the soot layer rapidly disappeared in in situ HTOM, while both the black band and dispersed part of soot on a alumina substrate remained without combustion even kept at 650 °C. Therefore, soot did not move with micron-order distance and its combustion process should depend on their contact points of catalyst surfaces and soot aggregate. This work provided a new type of catalytic material prepared from amorphous alloys which was effective soot combustion catalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An imprint process of Pd-based metallic glass is used to create a high-aspect-ratio two-dimensional wire array structure for filtering terahertz (THz) radiation. By the simplified imprinting process, a 10×10 straight wire array with a wire height of ∼320 µm and a diameter of 100.6 µm is produced. The negligibly small expansion of ∼0.3% confirms the excellent thermal imprinting property of metallic glass. The periodic wire array is shown to act as a high-pass filter in the THz range, and the transmission property measurement reveals a turn-on frequency of 0.4 THz, suggesting the promising approach and material for robust high-pass filters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]