Numerical analysis of droplet breakup, cooling, and solidification during gas atomisation

ABSTRACT As gas atomisation has been the main method for producing high-performance spherical powders in the past decades, its application in the production of metallic powders has become one of the main research subjects in this field. Since it is challenging to directly observe the atomising gas and to investigate melt flow states by experiments, numerical simulation is attracting increasing interest in studying the gas atomisation process. In this work, various computational fluid dynamics models were implemented to simulate the gas atomisation process. With the models, the droplet breakup, cooling, and solidification within the coupled process were investigated. The final mean particle size was predicted through numerical simulations and compared with the statistics extracted from the gas atomisation process, which shows that a reasonable mass median diameter of the particle can be predicted numerically. The results also show a clear relationship between the breakup trajectory and the resulting particle size.