WETTABILITY OF SOLIDS BY MOLTEN METALS AND ALLOYS

Knowledge about wetting phenomena is of great importance for many tech nological applications. The aim of this article is to present a brief re view of recent investigations on the wettability of solid non-metal s by liquid metals. The wetting behaviour in these systems attracts th e interest of scientists and engineers for both practical and theoreti cal reasons and consequently a great amount of experimental data on th e subject of wetting has been accumulated during the past decades. How ever, data are strongly scattered which makes both the critical approa ch to the experimentally obtained knowledge and the development of mor e reliable theoretical models for prediction of the wetting behaviour highly desirable. An attempt is made in this survey to explain the rea sons for the scatter of contact (wetting) angle data. Some recently de veloped theoretical models explaining the wetting phenomena are also p resented. Examples are given for possible applications of the current better understanding of wetting in process metallurgy where, depending on the particular application, better or worse wetting is needed.