Building Vertical Walls by Deposition of Molten Metal Droplets

Abstract

Experiments were conducted to determine conditions under which good metallurgical bonding was achieved in vertical walls composed of multiple layers of droplets that were fabricated by depositing tin droplets layer by layer. Molten tin droplets (0.75 mm diameter) were deposited using a pneumatic droplet generator on an aluminum substrate. The primary parameters varied in experiments were those found to most affect bonding between droplets on different layers: droplet temperature (varied from 250°C to 325°C) and substrate temperature (varied from 100°C to 190°C). Considering the cooling rate of droplet is much faster than the deposition rate previous deposition layer cooled down too much that impinging droplets could only remelt a thin surface layer after impact. Assuming that remelting between impacting droplets and the previous deposition layer is a one-dimensional Stefan problem with phase change an analytical solution can be found and applied to predict the minimum droplet temperature and substrate temperature required for local remelting. It was experimentally confirmed that good bonding at the interface of two adjacent layers could be achieved when the experimental parameters were such that the model predicted remelting.