Versatile Levitation Facility for Structural Investigations of Liquid Metals

Abstract

A versatile levitation facility for structural investigations of liquid metals was developed. It consists of a vacuum-tight process chamber containing a nozzle for aerodynamic levitation and a coil for inductive heating. This new technique offers the advantages of the two approaches previously used separately: high sample stability, homogeneous heating and good temperature control enabling easy access to the undercooled state of the sample. The chamber is designed for structural investigations by x-ray diffraction and by x-ray absorption (EXAFS). The levitation facility has been used on beamline ID15 at ESRF in Grenoble. High Energy X-Ray diffraction measurements of liquid Al-based alloys Al-Cu, Al-Fe, Al-Ni, and Al-Ti using an image plate detector were performed. This paper discusses the experimental set-up for both, diffraction and absorption measurements, and presents first results obtained on liquid binary Al-based melts.