Numerical Modeling of a Metallic Alloy Droplet Impact, Solidification, and Macrosegregation
Abstract
For the first time, we study the effects of mass transfer on alloy droplet impact, solidification, and solute non-homogeneity or MacroSegregation (MS). For this purpose, a multi-physics model, including fully-coupled hydrodynamics of multiphase flow, wetting, conjugate heat transfer, phase change, and mass transfer, is established and validated carefully across several benchmarks. In addition, a concentration-flux-correction algorithm is proposed to conserve the solute mass within the droplet at the numerical discretization level. The validated model is subsequently used to explore the impact and solidification of an alloy droplet. The results show that accounting for mass transfer and solute transport improves the prediction of the dynamics of a solidifying splat, in a consistent manner with experimental observations, while this effect has been neglected in all previous studies. The analysis demonstrates that this improvement results from the flow sensitivity to the mushy region thickness, which is regulated by local solute concentration through the solidus and liquidus temperatures. Furthermore, analyses of the MS map identify several critical segregation regions most susceptible to defect initiation, such as cracking, including a long negatively segregated vein within the lamella, formed by the severe advective flow through the mush in the middle stages of the impact, a positively segregated region near the rim of the splat, appearing as a result of hook formation, and a major positively segregated zone at the top of the rim, which develops following the accumulation of the solute-rich melt sustained by washout from the lamella.
Versions
Related
- Accelerating droplet-laden Stokes flow simulations with hierarchical surrogate modeling
- Numerical approximation of nonlinear fractional dynamical systems for coastal wave modeling: rigorous analysis of convergence and computational efficiency
- Numerical modeling of oscillations for axisymmetric solar backgrounds with differential rotation and gravity
- Cascade at local yield strain for silica and metallic glass
- Hankel determinants for the (n+2)-shifted q-metallic numbers
BibTeX
@misc{amani2026numerical,
title = {{Numerical Modeling of a Metallic Alloy Droplet Impact, Solidification, and Macrosegregation}},
author = {Ehsan Amani and Ali Moinirad},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.15381},
eprint = {2610.15381},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15381},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Numerical Modeling of a Metallic Alloy Droplet Impact, Solidification, and Macrosegregation
AU - Ehsan Amani
AU - Ali Moinirad
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.15381
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15381
AB - For the first time, we study the effects of mass transfer on alloy droplet impact, solidification, and solute non-homogeneity or MacroSegregation (MS). For this purpose, a multi-physics model, including fully-coupled hydrodynamics of multiphase flow, wetting, conjugate heat transfer, phase change, and mass transfer, is established and validated carefully across several benchmarks. In addition, a concentration-flux-correction algorithm is proposed to conserve the solute mass within the droplet at the numerical discretization level. The validated model is subsequently used to explore the impact and solidification of an alloy droplet. The results show that accounting for mass transfer and solute transport improves the prediction of the dynamics of a solidifying splat, in a consistent manner with experimental observations, while this effect has been neglected in all previous studies. The analysis demonstrates that this improvement results from the flow sensitivity to the mushy region thickness, which is regulated by local solute concentration through the solidus and liquidus temperatures. Furthermore, analyses of the MS map identify several critical segregation regions most susceptible to defect initiation, such as cracking, including a long negatively segregated vein within the lamella, formed by the severe advective flow through the mush in the middle stages of the impact, a positively segregated region near the rim of the splat, appearing as a result of hook formation, and a major positively segregated zone at the top of the rim, which develops following the accumulation of the solute-rich melt sustained by washout from the lamella.
ER -