Direct determination of the surface tension of metal alloys near the melting point by means of the generation of spherical microparticles in uniform electric fields

Abstract

The possibility of modeling microparticles of various alloys of interest through an electric field of medium and high intensity is considered in order to obtain in a straight way the surface tension near the melting point. To this end, a new method for the fabrication of microparticles by spark machining is used as an experimental framework for this study. We explicitly show, using a simple model based on a flat parallel capacitor, that both the expressions of the electric field and the series expansion of the surface tension near the melting point contain the same critical parameter. Considerations regarding other empirical works as well as some examples of our method using data of previous experimental work involving fabrication of microspheres of Fe and UMo are explicitly given.