Visualization and modeling for water atomization of low melting point alloy

Liquid metal fragmentation by impinging fast water spray, so called water atomization, is widely used to produce metal powders efficiently. In the present paper, we conduct the high-speed visualization experiments and theoretical modeling for elucidating the mechanism of fragmentation and solidification processes, which are essentially important to control the metal powder characters. We successfully visualize the detailed sequential events from the water spray ejection, freely dropped molten metal of 42Sn-58Bi, followed by their collision, metal fragmentation in liquid phase, and solidification, leading to revealing the fragmentation processes as the impact of water spray and the vapor explosion. Quantified metal particle size convinces that the water atomization simultaneously proceeds fragmentation of metal in liquid phase with solidification. The experimental results of size distribution and mean diameter well validate the proposed physically-consistent theoretical modeling for the prediction of particle size.