Numerical study and experimental validation of copper powder plasma spheroidization process

Abstract As the extensive research in Additive Manufacturing (AM) shows, the powder characteristics, such as particle size and geometry, play an important role in determining the quality of powder layer and part fabricated with powder-based AM processes. It has been found that spherical particles result in better powder flowability and spreadability. An attempt to improve particle sphericity is to process the powder using the plasma spheroidization process, 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 sufficed to characterize the powder particle size without evaluating the particle geometries. In this work, the plasma spheroidization process of copper powder was numerically examined to assess the impact of plasma spheroidization process on powder geometry and particle size. For the first time in literature, a method was proposed to quantify the particle geometry at each particle residence time. The results of simulation matched well with those of experiments.