| Abstract Scope |
HEA powders are commonly prepared by a top-down approach at high temperature, requiring huge energy consumption, special facilities, and unstable pure metals. In this work, we propose a bottom-up approach to prepare HEA powders from metal oxides as raw materials at low temperature. It has been found that CaH2 works as an efficient reducing agent to deoxidize the metal oxides especially when used within molten salts, such as molten LiCl. Using the superior deoxidation capacity of mixed molten CaH2–LiCl, CrMnFeCoNi powder including only 0.2 wt% oxygen is successfully obtained from a mixture of Cr2O3, MnO2, Fe2O3, Co3O4, and NiO after 20 h heating at 850 degree Celsius. Obtained HEA powders possess high specific surface areas due to the low temperature synthesis, and it has been demonstrated that the high surface area HEA powders exhibit high catalytic performance in organic compound hydrogenations and electrochemical reactions. |