CFD modeling of primary breakup during metal powder atomization

Powder metals are the basis of powder metallurgy with a large variety of applications, including sintering and thermal spray coatings. The Gas atomization process has been widely employed as an effective method to produce fine spherical metal powders. New applications and emerging surface technologies demand high quality powders with a very narrow particle size distribution. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach is developed to examine complex fluids during atomization from different nozzle designs, using the volume of fluid (VOF) method and the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM). The modeling results show that the swirling gas atomizer is not beneficial to the atomization process while the inner-jet atomizer can improve the powder generation processing. ► Primary breakup of gas atomization is successfully modeled. ► Three different nozzle designs for closed-coupled atomizers are compared. ► I-nner jet atomizer performs better than a swirling gas atomizer.