EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

It is widely accepted that there is a need to create a digital twin of gas atomisation to aid development and increase the production and energy efficiency of the process. This talk will summarise research efforts to understand the gas flows in gas atomisation using experimentally validated computational fluid dynamics simulations. Such simulations are able to predict the profile of gas flow from a nozzle under conditions typical of gas atomisation. The simulations have been validated experimentally using shadowgraphy and the results shall be compared to the simulation predictions. The feasibility of computational fluid dynamics simulations to predict the behaviours of gas flows from annular and multiple discrete nozzles shall be explored. The presentation will also include progress made in modelling the cooling and solidification of individual liquid droplets in a gas stream, including experimental validation using secondary dendrite arm spacing. Prospects for modelling the breakup of a melt stream to predict the droplet size distribution shall also be explored. Should a complete digital twin of the gas atomisation process be achieved, it would be a powerful tool to design new powder chemistry and to design new atomiser configurations and parameters to allow the production of the alloys that additive manufacturing and other powder-based manufacturing processes desperately need to grow and contribute to a sustainable future. This work is a significant step towards that goal.