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Low-temperature activity is an important requirement for automotive catalysts. In particular, most of the tailpipe emissions occur right after the engine starts (cold emissions). These emissions can be effectively reduced by using a trap material such as zeolite for hydrocarbon (HC) adsorption [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. However, using zeolite as a trap material in automotive catalyst is limited due to its low durability under hydrothermal aging conditions. That is the reason why zeolites can be often used for diesel engines which usually run at lower temperature than the gasoline engines during entire mode driving. In most cases, zeolites need to be placed away from large thermal loads in order to take advantage of their adsorption abilities. In general, the thermal endurance of close-coupled catalysts for gasoline powered vehicles proceeds at about 1000 °C in the presence of water.

A copper alloy powder composed of Cu-14Ni-3Si-2V-2Cr-1.5Fe-1Al-0.5P has been developed for application to laser-clad valve seats. Laser-clad valve seats offer several advantages such as higher engine output and improved fuel economy owing to lower valve head temperature and an increased intake throat diameter compared with conventional press-fit valve inserts made of ferro-based powder metal. Previously, a material having a principal chemical composition of Cu-12Ni-10Co-3Si-2V-2Nb-1.5Fe-1Al was developed to obtain large hard intermetallic compounds. The microstructure of this material is formed by a two-liquid separation reaction, which has been applied to powders of different chemical compositions for laser-clad valve seats of production engines. Although this material shows superior valve seat wear resistance, it has certain drawbacks, including the high cost of the powder, high probability of microcrack formation and low machinability of the laser-clad layer.