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The present status of catalyst preparation using nonthermal plasma treatment has been summarized in this paper. Improved dispersion, better low-temperature activity, enhanced stability, and better anti-carbon deposition performance can be achieved with nonthermal plasma-treated catalysts. The improvement in catalyst preparation with nonthermal plasma treatment can reduce or avoid the use of hazardous chemicals. Nonthermal plasma catalyst treatment has especially induced a new development of nonthermal plasma for catalyst reduction. The reduction using hydrogen at high temperatures or using hazardous liquid chemicals can be replaced by the developed plasma reduction process. The mechanism for nonthermal plasma treatment has been presented. An analog between the man-made gas discharge plasmas and the environment inside the zeolite pores and around catalyst surface defects is also proposed.

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Ice formation and accretion affect residential and commercial activities. Icephobic coatings decrease the ice adhesion strength (τ ice ) to less than 100 kPa. However, rare icephobic coatings remove the ice under the action of gravity or natural winds. The icephobicity of such coatings depends on materials with low interfacial toughness. We develop durable candle soot icephobic coating with RTV-1 as a low-modulus binding material. Heterogeneous nucleation on 20−40 nm candle soot particles and their fracture mechanism are discussed. The developed coating always shows durable Cassie−Baxter superhydrophobic state with low ice adhesion (18 kPa) and maintains the τ ice value of about 25 kPa after severe mechanical abrasion, 30 liquid nitrogen/water cycles, 100 frosting/defrosting cycles, 100 icing/deicing cycles, acid/base exposure, under UV light, and exposure to natural freezing rain in Hangzhou. In addition, the proposed technique is time-efficient, inexpensive, and suitable for large-scale applications.

Various organogel materials with either a liquid or solid surface layer have recently been designed and prepared. In this work, amphiphilic organogels (AmOG) are innovatively developed from copolymer P­(PDMS-r-PEG-r-GMA) and 2,2′-diaminodiphenyldisulfide via epoxy group addition reaction and then infiltrated with amphiphilic lubricants instead of traditional hydrophilic or hydrophobic lubricants. Because of synergistic effects of hydrophilic and hydrophobic segments of amphiphilic lubricants, the AmOG surfaces showed high stability and excellent anti-icing performance. The delay in the freezing point of water was 1000 s on AmOG surfaces, which is 40 times longer as compared to the untreated hydrophilic glass surface. More importantly, low ice adhesion strength (15.1 kPa) was observed on AmOG which remained about 40 kPa even after 20 icing–deicing cycles. The novel amphiphilic organogels provide a new idea to prepare long-term anti-icing materials for practical applications.

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The multi-component catalysts we prepared exhibited high performance for the oxidative coupling of methane. The highest activity of catalysts was obtained over the Na-W-Mn-Zr-S-P/SiO 2 at the temperature of 1,023 K, on which the C 2 yield was 23.5% at the methane conversion of 43.8%. XRD and XPS results showed the S, P addition could lead to the increase of lattice oxygen concentration and the formation of phase such as Na 2 SO 4 , Na 2 Zr(PO 4 ) 2 on the catalysts. These phases play great roles in activity of the catalysts system.