Nitrogen versus helium: effects of the choice of the atomizing gas on the structures of Fe50Ni30Si10B10 and Fe32Ni36Ta7Si8B17 powders

Gas atomization can produce, besides a possible significant degree of undercooling, high cooling rates, whose extent depends on the size of the droplets, on their velocity with respect to the surrounding medium, on the thermo-physical properties of both the alloy and the gas, and of course on the operating conditions such as melt overheating and gas-to-metal flow ratio. In this respect it is well-known that the atomizing gas can play a significant role in determining both the powder size distribution and the kind and mix of phases which result from the solidification and cooling processes. The microstructures and solidification morphologies of powders obtained from nitrogen and helium sonic gas atomization of two iron–nickel base glass forming alloys, Fe50Ni30Si10B10 and Fe32Ni36Ta7Si8B17, were investigated by means of light microscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and differential thermal analysis (DTA). The Fe32Ni36Ta7Si8B17 alloy exhibits a higher proneness to the development of amorphous phase than the Fe50Ni30Si10B10 alloy, while the effect of the higher speed attainable by the stream of helium with respect to that of nitrogen, affords not only to obtain a larger amount of particles in the finer size ranges, but also to affect the relative amounts of phases within the different size fractions.