This paper summarizes the latest results in the development of a combined pressure-swirl-gas atomizer. The main goals of this investigation are to characterize the generated metal powders in terms of spray pattern and particle size distribution. With the combined pressure-swirl-gas atomizer it is possible to create 150kg h–^-1 of tin powder with mass medians between 30 and 110μm (tin alloys) and geometric standard deviations below 1.9 with a nitrogen consumption of 100kg h^–1. Gas flow and melt mass flow can be varied independently of each other, while their characteristic ratio of mass flows can be held below 0.7, which opens new potential for low gas consumption in gas atomization. The experiments were conducted with water and tin melts as model fluids. The comparison of the dimensionless numbers shows that the model experiments are comparable and basically extendable to other melts as long as the material characteristics allow this.

Direct link: http://www.ijmr.de/directlink.asp?MK101423