Composites consisted of ceramic paper, nanoparticles as well as molten salt electrolyte, are developed as the new electrolyte separators to substitute the traditional ones in thermal batteries, due to their flexible manufacture and good exhibition in electrochemical performance. However, the existed methods for fabricating the composites by roughly dip-coating with aqueous solutions, are suffering from drawbacks such as inefficiency, low consistence, or high temperature risk. Therefore, a new approach based on a melting-absorption-diffusion process, by using precursors without solvent, is developed. Firstly, the salts are accurately weighted. Then they melt on surfaces of ceramic papers and diffuse inside. After being treated at appropriate temperature for hours, high quality electrolyte separators based on ceramic papers are achieved. Compared to the traditional approaches, the new method can obviously increase and accurately control the amount of loaded nanoparticles and molten salts for each time. The achieved electrolyte separators also exhibit good electrochemical performance in single cells of thermal batteries compared with the traditional ones. With advantages like easy operation, high efficiency, and improved performance, this melting and in situ loading method holds broad prospect in preparing electrolyte separators at large scale.
To address short-term emission of massive particulate matter (PM) from diesel engines, rapid regeneration of catalyzed diesel particulate filters (CDPF) based on soot combustion is a considerable challenge. Herein, we employed an aluminosilicate fiber-weaved ceramic paper (CP) as a filter matrix, on which highly active potassium-supported antimony-doped tin oxides (K/ATO) were coated to fabricate a CDPF. The K/ATO/CP monolith preserves the 3D-network structure of CP while incorporating the mesopores of K/ATO, providing potential for trapping soot particles effectively. Furthermore, electricity pulses are designed to pass through the conductive K/ATO coating on the monolith for CDPF regeneration, achieving nearly complete soot conversion within less than half a minute using 1400 J of energy input. Both the reaction rate and the energy efficiency surpass previously reported those of other methods for soot combustion. Mechanism studies revealed that the electricity pulse can stimulate the release of tremendous lattice oxygen from the catalyst and in turn trigger rapid soot combustion, and boost surface sulfate decomposition to alleviate SO 2 poisoning. This work presents an electrification strategy to realize rapid regeneration of CDPF for effective PM elimination utilizing onboard electricity system for hybrid powers.