Study on stable delivery of charged uniform droplets for freeform fabrication of metal parts

Electrostatic delivery of charged uniform metal droplets is a novel method to deposit metal parts with short process period and low cost. But the delivery process is unstable and delivery accuracy of charged droplets deteriorates because of actions of mutual interactions of closely charged droplets. A droplet generator with droplet charging and deflecting system has been established to find out the way for stably and accurately deflecting droplets. The parameters for generating uniform droplets were first studied. Then the droplet deflections and metal parts depositions with different charge methods were discussed. The results show that the unbalanced electrostatic repelling forces are the main factor to cause the unstable deflection of droplets. The droplets deflection distance can be predicted and controlled by balancing the repelling forces of charged droplets. The metal parts are stably deposited after combining the board charged pulse and substrate motion, indicating that the work can provide useful theoretical and experimental guide for droplet-based freeform fabrication.

Simulation on deposition and solidification processes of 7075 Al alloy droplets in 3D printing technology

In order to study the successive deposition and solidification processes of uniform alloy droplets during the drop-on-demand three dimensional（3D） printing method,based on the volume of fluid（VOF） method,a 3D numerical model was employed.In this model,the 7075 alloy with larger temperature range for phase change was used.The simulation results show that the successive deposition and solidification processes of uniform 7075 alloy droplets can be well characterized by this model.Simulated droplets shapes agree well with SEM images under the same condition.The effects of deposition and solidification of droplets result in vertical and L-shaped ridges on the surface of droplets,and tips of dendrites appear near the overlap of droplets due to rapid solidification.

How Much Do Adjuvant and Nozzles Models Reduce the Spraying Drift? Drift in Agricultural Spraying

The spraying of herbicides in crops has become the main form of weed control. Although it means unexpected effects on non-target plants resulted by spraying drift. Thus, improvements in application techniques, as the best selection of spray nozzles and adjuvant, are essential to avoid environmental contamination and economic losses. On this work, we evaluate how much adjuvant associated with nozzles can reduce the spray drift. The nozzles used at experiment were air induction flat tip, hollow cone and twinjet and the spray liquids, which were composed of herbicide glyphosate and phosphatidylcholine + propionic acid adjuvant. Measurements were made at wind tunnel and droplet sizer, at laser diffraction method. The models of nozzles influence in droplet size characteristics and in occurrence of spray drift. The use of adjuvants reduces the spray drift only combined with the twinjet nozzle, while for the other models the adjuvant did not reduce the global spray drift at significant levels. The adjuvant reduced the spray drift until 39%, while the nozzles model reduced until 74%. Both techniques when combined were able to reduce until 80%. The model of nozzle has the biggest result on drift mitigation and the use of adjuvants can increase the drift mitigation specially with nozzles that produces smallest droplets.