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 AlSi12 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 AlSi12 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 produce 10–200 μm-sized spherical particles of AlSi12. The Ansys-CFX computational fluid dynamics software was used to analyze the flow behavior of AlSi12 liquid droplets and particle size refinement in the narrow voids of the sample.