Oxidation conditions of pure liquid metals and alloys

The evaluation of oxygen-liquid metal interactions is a topic of undoubted interest for different technological processes such as optimizing the preparation of binary alloys. In such instances, productive processes can be more easily studied using theoretical approaches based on the study of mass-transport phenomena in liquid metal-gas systems. Therefore, a physico-mathematical method for analyzing the interaction of liquid metals or liquid binary alloys and their oxides has been developed. The theoretical results of this analysis and the model validations performed up until now indicate that the behaviour of an alloy to oxidation tends to be similar to that of the less oxidizable component because the evaporation of a highly volatile oxide can prevent surface oxidation, even if the corresponding metal is present in low percentages. This paper aims to provide a more systematic analysis of the behaviour of a number of different pure metals to oxidization and to determine which of them is most likely to contribute to keeping the surface of a binary alloy free of oxygen. © 2011, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.