Accuracy of the Shardt–Elliott–Connors–Wright equation for predicting the surface tension of metal alloys

Abstract

Surface tension influences the processing of molten metals including welding, soldering, refining, and casting, but it is challenging to measure at high temperatures, and thus it is an important property to predict. In particular, the surface tension of metal alloys is crucial to predict as a function of alloy composition and temperature. Previously, we developed the Shardt–Elliott–Connors–Wright (SECW) model that has the advantage of being able to predict the surface tension of mixtures as a function of composition and temperature using as inputs only the temperature dependence of pure components and the composition dependence at a single reference temperature. This model has been shown to be accurate for a broad range of non-metal mixtures. In this work, we extend the applicability of our model to six metal alloy systems, resulting in an absolute average percent deviation from experimental measurements of 1.9% over all studied compositions and temperatures ranging between 513 K and 1503 K (419 experimental data points).