Kinetic spray process

Kinetic spray processes utilize injection of a powder into a heated gas stream passed into a converging-diverging nozzle. The powder is held below the melting point and the impact of the accelerated powder onto the substrate creates a coating. Resultant coatings are dense, have material properties similar to the starting powder and the coating are usually in compression. 

In the HVOF process, combustion under high pressure produces a jet of flame which travels at over 2000m/sec.. Powder is then injected into this jet by means of a carrier gas. The structure and properties of the resulting coat are determined by the amount of kinetic and thermal energy transferred to the particles of coating material during the spraying process. 

Most spraying processes work under dynamic conditions and improvement of their efficiency requires the use of surfactants that lower the liquid surface tension yLv under these dynamic conditions. The interfaces involved (e.g. droplets formed in a spray or impacting on a surface) are freshly formed and have only a small effective age of some seconds or even less than a millisecond. The most frequently used parameter to characterize the dynamic properties of liquid adsorption layers is the dynamic surface tension (that is a time dependent quantity). Techniques should be available to measure yLv as a function of time (ranging firom a fraction of a millisecond to minutes and hours or days). To optimize the use of surfactants, polymers and mixtures of them specific knowledge of their dynamic adsorption behavior rather than equilibrium properties is of great interest [28]. It is, therefore, necessary to describe the dynamics of surfeictant adsorption at a fundamental level. The first physically sound model for adsorption kinetics was derived by Ward and Tordai [29]. It is based on the assumption that the time dependence of surface or interfacial tension, which is directly proportional to the surface excess F (moles m ), is caused by diffusion and transport of surfeictant molecules to the interface. This is referred to as the diffusion controlled adsorption kinetics model . This diffusion controlled model assumes transport by diffusion of the surface active molecules to be the rate controlled step. The so called kinetic controlled model is based on the transfer mechanism of molecules from solution to the adsorbed state and vice versa [28]. 

For this two-phase gas/liquid flow, the gas Weber number is introduced as the ratio between the applied relative kinetic energy (here by the relative velocity of the gas and the liquid (emulsion) phases) and the interfacial energy (restriction for interface deformation) of the sprayed emulsion. For the spraying process, two gas Weber numbers were defined (i) concerning the tertiary spray droplet (Wgg Nozzle)... 

One of the advanced concepts for capturing CO2 is an absorption process that utilizes dry regenerable sorbents. Pure sodium bicarbonate from Dongyang Chemical Company and spray-dried sorbents were used to examine the characteristics of CO2 reaction in a flue gas environment. The chemical characteristics were investigated in a fast fluidized reactor of 0.025 m i.d., and the effects of several variables on sorbent activity, including gas velocity (1.5 to 3.5 m/s), temperature (40 to 70 °C), and solid concentration (15 to 25 kg/m /s)], were examined in a fast fluidized-bed. Spray-dried Sorb NX30 showed fast kinetics in the fluidized reactor. 

The second question asked what would be an excessive temperature for this process. It was recommended that process hot spots (i.e., zones higher than 100°C) should be avoided. This requirement was met by keeping the heating lines, the walls of the melting pot, and the spray head thermally jacketed to maintain the appropriate internal soak temperature. As a result, the model presented a potential for hot spots at the skin surfaces of the lines and equipment walls. This needed to be investigated for its decomposition potential, and in fact, after several batches were processed, the flexible heat-traced lines had to be discarded because of a buildup of a blacked residue on the inner tubing walls. The kinetic model predicted how many batches could be run before this necessary replacement maintenance was required. 

It should be indicated that a probability density function has been derived on the basis of maximum entropy formalism for the prediction of droplet size distribution in a spray resulting from the breakup of a liquid sheet)432 The physics of the breakup process is described by simple conservation constraints for mass, momentum, surface energy, and kinetic energy. The predicted, most probable distribution, i.e., maximum entropy distribution, agrees very well with corresponding empirical distributions, particularly the Rosin-Rammler distribution. Although the maximum entropy distribution is considered as an ideal case, the approach used to derive it provides a framework for studying more complex distributions. 

With the above-described heat transfer model and rapid solidification kinetic model, along with the related process parameters and thermophysical properties of atomization gases (Tables 2.6 and 2.7) and metals/alloys (Tables 2.8,2.9,2.10 and 2.11), the 2-D distributions of transient droplet temperatures, cooling rates, achievable undercoolings, and solid fractions in the spray can be calculated, once the initial droplet sizes, temperatures, and velocities are established by the modeling of the atomization stage, as discussed in the previous subsection. For the implementation of the heat transfer model and the rapid solidification kinetic model, finite difference methods or finite element methods may be used. To characterize the entire size distribution of droplets, some specific droplet sizes (forexample,.D0 16,Z>05, andZ)0 84) are to be considered in the calculations of the 2-D motion, cooling and solidification histories. 

An interesting approach to the spray problem has been suggested by Chiu and Liu [29], who consider a quasi-steady vaporization and diffusion process with infinite reaction kinetics. They show the importance of a group combustion number (G), which is derived from extensive mathematical analyses and takes the form... 

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