Kinetics of reactive wetting of graphite by liquid Al and Cu–Si alloys

In order to reveal the physical essence of the spreading process of reactive wetting, a sort of model of energy to explain the driving force and wetting mechanism was presented. The reactive wetting of molten Al and Cu–Si on graphite was studied by a modified sessile drop method under a vacuum, in which the contact angles were measured by ADSA software. The thermodynamic and kinetic processes of the typical reactive wetting were focused on, the thermodynamic equations of energy relations were derived, the interfacial energy of graphite and solid–liquid interfacial energy versus time at the triple line were calculated, and the dynamics model of interface energy is established. The presented dynamics model is verified by means of experimental results, and it is shown that solid–liquid interfacial energy decreases with time in exponential relationship. It provides a new method for reference to explain the process from the angle of energy.