Flattening behavior of copper droplets in plasma spray forming

A two-dimensional axisymmetric model, with 8700 and 7500 quadrilateral elements for the fluid and substrate zone separately, was developed to simulate the impacting and flattening process. The volume of fluid technique was employed to track the interface between the air and droplet. The relationships between the droplet pre-impact parameters and the flattening time as well as the flattening ratio were investigated by altering one of the parameters while remaining the others unchanged. The results show that the droplet height reaches its minimum value at approximately half of the spreading time, which also indicates the finish of vertical fluid flow at that time. The flattening ratio increases with the increase of the three pre-impact parameters-droplet diameter, temperature and velocity, even though the flattening time decreases when the droplet velocity increase.