Melt spinning

Melt spinning is a technique used for rapid cooling of liquids. A wheel is cooled internally, usually by water or liquid nitrogen, and rotated. A thin stream of liquid is then dripped onto the wheel and cooled, causing rapid solidification. This technique is used to develop materials that require extremely high cooling rates in order to form, such as metallic glasses. The cooling rates achievable by melt-spinning are on the order of 10⁴–10⁷kelvins per second (K/s)^[1]. A slight variation of this technique is also commonly used to produce polymeric fibers such as nylon, usually with numerous threads spinning at the same time. When spinning nylon, often "takeup" "tensioning" wheels will be employed, to allow for the nylon to be drawn neatly onto a spool. This is done in a fashion similar to the drawing of optic fibres, which may not be the case for melt spinning of metals.

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The concept of the melt spinner was developed by Pond And Maddin in 1969, whereby liquid was quenched on the inner surface of a drum^[1], then later as a continuous casting technique by Liebermann and Graham ^[2]. However the melt spinner is only able to produce small thin ribbon shaped specimens, some as thin as 10 micrometres. This limits melt spinning to mainly production of research specimens for alloys with high critical cooling rate, which are difficult to fabricate with other techniques.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} R. W. Cahn, Physical Metallurgy, Third edition, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1983
2. ^ Libermann H. and Graham C., Production Of Amorphous Alloy Ribbons And Effects Of Apparatus Parameters On Ribbon Dimensions, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol Mag-12, No 6, 1976