Numerical study and experimental validation of copper powder plasma spheroidization process

Abstract

The powder characteristics, such as particle size and geometry, play an important role in determining the quality of powder layer and parts fabricated with powder-based additive manufacturing processes. Previous research has found that spherical particles result in better powder flowability and spreadability. An attempt to improve particle sphericity is to process the powder using plasma spheroidization, where the particles heat up, melt, and reshape to spheres. Several research works have been conducted to study the plasma spheroidization process and understand particle-plasma reactions. Although researchers have turned to simulations to overcome the difficulty of experimental study of such reactions, they only characterized the powder particle size without evaluating the particle geometry. In this work, the plasma spheroidization process of copper powder was numerically and experimentally examined to assess the impact of plasma spheroidization on particle size and geometry. For the first time in the literature, a method of simulation was proposed to numerically quantify the particle geometry at each particle residence time. The results of simulation agreed well with those of experiments.