Abstract
Waste from treated wood can be hazardous to the environment and human health. Therefore, research is needed to investigate what to do with this waste. The electro-removal technique is a viable technique to remove the copper, chromium and arsenic metals contained in the CCA-treated wood. But is the CCA really removed? the present study investigated this cause, using the living organism Trametes versicolor to verify this hypothesis.
Spark plasma sintering (SPS) is widely used for the consolidation of different materials. Copper-based pseudo alloys have found a variety of applications including as electrodes in vacuum interrupters of high-voltage electric circuits. How does the kinetics of SPS consolidation for such alloys depend on the heating rate? Do SPS kinetics depend on the microstructure of the media to be sintered? These questions were addressed by the investigation of SPS kinetics in the heating rate range of 0.1 to 50 K/s. The latter conditions were achieved through flash spark plasma sintering (FSPS). We also compared the sintering kinetics for the conventional copper–chromium mixture and for the mechanically induced copper/chromium nanostructured particles. It was shown that, under FSPS conditions, the observed maximum consolidation rates were 20–30 times higher than that for conventional SPS with a heating rate of 100 K/min. Under the investigated conditions, the sintering rate for mechanically induced composite Cu/Cr particles was 2–4 times higher compared to the conventional Cu + Cr mixtures. The apparent sintering activation energy for the Cu/Cr powder was twice less than that for Cu–Cr mixture. It was concluded that the FSPS of nanostructured powders is an efficient approach for the fabrication of pseudo-alloys.
A well-designed NiCuCr-LDH was prepared using a simple microwave method. According to the OER results, doping optimal amount of Cu2+ into NiCr-LDH displayed superior OER activity, due to decreased bandgap energy and improved charge transfer.
Size effects on microstructure and mechanical properties of additively manufactured copper–chromium–niobium alloy