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

Bulk metallic glasses are advanced materials that are emerging as an important industrial and commercial material. Their properties can be superior to several conventional Ti-, Al-, or Fe-based alloys. In addition to the traditional casting processes, other production routes that involve the liquid phase of the bulk metallic glass alloys have been established, such as additive manufacturing methods like selective laser melting. These manufacturing processes can be optimized by numerical process simulations, which require thermophysical property data of the liquid melt and the solid glass. Furthermore, the thermophysical properties can be used to derive thermodynamic functions that are important for an improved understanding of glass formation.
Measurements of thermophysical properties are best performed using container-less methods to avoid reactions and contaminations of the liquid samples with the container material.
During the last few years, several bulk metallic glasses were investigated in their liquid phase in the electromagnetic levitator ISS-EML on board the international space station (ISS), as well as by parabolic flight campaigns.
The two Zr-based glasses Vit106a (Zr58.5Cu15.6Ni12.8Al10.3Nb2.8) and LM105 (Zr52.5Cu17.9Ni14.6Ti5Al10), as well as a Fe-based glass former (Fe57.75Ni19.25Mo10.0C5.0B8.0) were processed successfully in the ISS-EML. That allowed the determination of many thermophysical properties, such as surface tension, viscosity, specific heat, total hemispherical emissivity, and electrical resistivity of these samples.
We give an overview over the ISS-EML capabilities and the thermophysical properties measured for some bulk metallic glasses.