Advances in the measurement of density and thermal expansion of undercooled liquid metals

Abstract

The determination of thermophysical properties of liquid metals in the undercooled state must, in the current state of the art, be accomplished by a contactless method. Presented here is an improvement of the existing image acquisition and processing techniques that are used in determining the density of undercooled metallic melts. The contactless method used is electromagnetic levitation. The levitation apparatus, method of image acquisition, digital image processing, and calculation methods are described, followed by an analysis of the errors implicit in the technique.