Estimation of Cooling Rates During Close-Coupled Gas Atomization Using Secondary Dendrite Arm Spacing Measurement

Al-4 wt pct Cu alloy has been gas atomized using a commercial close-coupled gas-atomization system. The resulting metal powders have been sieved into six size fractions, and the SDAS has been determined using electron microscopy. Cooling rates for the powders have been estimated using a range of published conversion factors for Al-Cu alloy, with reasonable agreement being found between sources. We find that cooling rates are very low relative to those often quoted for gas-atomized powders, of the order of 10(4) K s(-1) for sub-38 A mu m powders. We believe that a number of numerical studies of gas atomization have overestimated the cooling rate during solidification, probably as a consequence of overestimating the differential velocity between the gas and the particles. From the cooling rates measured in the current study, we estimate that such velocities are unlikely to exceed 20 m s(-1).