Cooling wheel features and amorphous ribbon formation during planar flow melt spinning process

A numerical model incorporating actual production conditions of planar flow melt spinning process is presented. Knowledge of the process conditions at which an amorphous ribbon with uniform thickness can be obtained is important to reduce the manufacturing costs. Cooling wheel conditions play a significant role during rapid solidification of the melt. Hence a heat transfer analysis is performed to investigate the influence of cooling wheel temperature on ribbon formation. Nusselt's correlation is used for the first time for selecting a convective heat transfer coefficient between rotating wheel and surrounding air. This approach assists in predicting the conditions at which a continuous/broken/no ribbon formation is obtained during the process. The model could predict whether the ribbon to be obtained is amorphous or non-amorphous before the experiment is actually performed at a set of process conditions. Various internal and external conditions of the cooling wheel are tested, and they show little influence on the ribbon thickness up to 0.5 s (10 rotations). Broken and nonamorphous ribbons are obtained for poor cooling conditions of the wheel with increase in time of cast from 0.5 s to 1 s (20 rotations). Amorphous ribbon with uniform thickness can be obtained for a wheel of 20 mm wall thickness, when the inner and outer surfaces of the cooling wheel are maintained at a temperature of at least 300 K.