Formation of spherical alloy microparticles in a porous salt medium

This study describes the development of a one-pot strategy to produce spherical alloy microparticles for advanced near-net-shape manufacturing processes, including additive manufacturing and powder injection molding. The Al Si12 eutectic alloy(ca. 12 wt% Si) system was chosen as the model with which the main experiments were carried out. The proposed process synergistically integrates a few common,low-cost processing techniques including the mixing of Al micrometer size particles with silicon and sodium chloride, heat-treating the mixture at temperatures of 650–810°C, and the dissolution of salt in water to produce spherical Al Si12 alloy particles without the need to rely on costly melting and atomizing techniques. This new process can use laow-cost source Al and Si powders as the raw materials to produce10–200 um-sized spherical particles of Al Si12. The Ansys-CFX computational fluid dynamics software was used to analyze the flow behavior of Al Si12 liquid droplets and particle size refinement in the narrow voids of the sample.