How Do We Make Amorphous Metals in 2020?
Amorphous metals have brought new
development opportunities for materials science and manufacturing, especially
in the field of energy conversion. Traditional crystalline alloys need to be
processed in multiple steps to obtain better properties, such as quenching and
electroplating. Amorphous metals can be formed in one step through a
single-step solution, such as rapid cooling during processing. Therefore, it
exhibits magical physical properties that any crystalline metal cannot reach,
such as high permeability and low magnetic loss.
Amorphous metals and common alloys
Metal alloys have the characteristic of
sharing crystal structure, which is a double-edged sword in terms of machining
and physical properties. Amorphous metal (bulk metallic glass) provides an
alternative in terms of materials due to the random arrangement of atoms.
Crystalline metals and amorphous metals are similar when heated to a molten
state at a high temperature, that is, both are amorphous. However, when
amorphous metals are rapidly cooled, they will directly change from liquid to
crystalline state. Therefore, it exhibits different characteristics from
crystalline metals.
Manufacturing of amorphous metals
Amorphous metals usually use a rapid
cooling method, usually 1 million degrees Celsius per second, to spray molten
iron into strips. The resulting ribbon made by SAT Amorphous can be wound into different shapes for
use in manufacturing amorphous cores, which are widely used in charging
piles, photovoltaics, inductors, medical equipment and other
applications. Compared with the advantages of traditional ferrite cores, please
refer to the previous article 'Nanocrystalline No Ferrite' on SAT BLOG.
Amorphous metal has a random atomic
structure
As the amorphous metal cools, the lack
of phase change will maintain a liquid microstructure in the formed metal.
Therefore, almost no shrinkage occurs during the manufacturing process, so the
manufacturing in the mold is the final result. It has the following advantages
when matching the mold to make the amorphous core:
1. The size of the amorphous core can be accurately controlled by the number of winding turns, and there will be no major deformation after molding.
2. The inside of the amorphous core can be drained by dipping paint to make the entire magnetic core structure more compact.