A general dispersion solution to prepare spherical microparticles of indium-based liquid metals by shear force

Abstract

The optimized dispersion solution for preparing well-dispersed In-based liquid metal (LM) microparticles via shear force was a glycerol solution containing 20 vol% polyethylene glycol and 0.2 wt% citric acid. The study demonstrated that the mean curvature obtained from volume of fluid (VOF) simulations can be considered as a significant reference index for optimizing solutions and technical parameters for the fabrication of In-based LM powders. Additionally, the results showed that molten In-based LM microparticles fuse as a whole as the oxide film is removed and the neighboring microparticles coalesce. Furthermore, the average diameter of In-Bi-Sn microparticles was the biggest, followed by that of In-Bi, In, and In-Sn microparticles, which was just opposite with the trend of mean curvature of the microparticles obtained from simulation. These findings provide new insights into the preparation and properties of LM microparticles, which are of great interest to the electronics industry.