Antistatic Fibers for High-Visibility Workwear: Challenges of Melt-Spinning Industrial Fibers

Safety workwear often requires antistatic protection to prevent the build-up of static electricity and sparks, which can be extremely dangerous in a working environment. In order to make synthetic antistatic fibers, electrically conducting materials such as carbon black are added to the fiber-forming polymer. This leads to unwanted dark colors in the respective melt-spun fibers. To attenuate the undesired dark color, we looked into various possibilities including the embedding of the conductive element inside a dull side-by-side bicomponent fiber. The bicomponent approach, with an antistatic compound as a minor element, also helped in preventing the severe loss of tenacity often caused by a high additive loading. We could melt-spin a bicomponent fiber with a specific resistance as low as 0.1 Ωm and apply it in a fabric that fulfills the requirements regarding the antistatic properties, luminance and flame retardancy of safety workwear.

Studies on Fe-Cr-Ni-Si-B Bulk Metallic Glass for Automotive Applications

Researches and developments were carried out for obtaining of bulk metallic glass (BMG) from the Fe-Cr-Ni-Si-B system. The used processing methods were copper mold casting and melt spinning method. The resulted materials are in form of sheets with sizes of 69.7 x 64 x 3/1.5 mm and of strips with thickness less than 50 microns, which were obtained by varying the melt spin technological parameters. The both processing variants are not suitable for obtaining such of alloy in bulk metallic glass form. Adding of zirconium to this alloy produces bulk metallic glasses only for the melt spin products. The DSC analysis emphases that the zirconium modified alloy processed by melt spinning method exhibits a high glass forming ability (GFA).

Correlation between microstructure, mechanical and thermal properties of In-Bi-Sn-Ag melt spun alloys

A series of indium-bismuth-tin-silver alloys containing up to 5 wt. % silver were quenched from melt by chill-block melt-spin technique. The resultant ribbons were studied by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, energy dispersive X-ray, and deferential scanning calorimetry techniques. Structural, Mechanical and thermal correlations were discussed and reviewed for In-Bi-Sn-Ag Field’s metal alloy systems. The results are interpreted in terms of the phase changes occurring in the alloy system. It is found that melting point, solidus and liquidus temperatures of the solder alloys are lowered as the Ag content is increased. With the addition of Ag, the In rich phase is finer in size, and the intermetallic compounds are more uniformly distributed. As a result, Young’s modulus and microhardness of In-Bi-Sn are increased when Ag is added into the solder alloy.  It is also , concluded that from our results, the present work relates to a melting temperature adjustable metal thermal interface material (TIM) applicable to an interface between a microelectronic packaging component and a heat dissipation device, so as to facilitate the heat dissipation of the microelectronic component.

Grain Refinement by Intragranular Nucleation in Si-Mn Steel Modified by the Fe-V-Nb-RE(Ce) Inoculants

The Fe-V-Nb-RE(Ce) alloy was rapidly solidified with melt-spin method, and the nano-sized ribbon was gained with the rolling wheel speed of 45m/s.The microstructure and the grain size of the Fe-V-Nb-RE(Ce) inoculants were performed by SEM and XRD respectively. Subsequently the microstructure of the steel modified by the Fe-V-Nb-Re(Ce) inoculants was also studied. The results show that the average grain size of the nano-scale Fe-V-Nb-RE(Ce) inoculants obtained is 26.1nm and a large mounts of nucleation sites in the steel exist in the form of (V, Nb)C and FeCeSi which effectively increases the nucleation rate and bring about the refinement of austenite grains.

Effects of Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Inoculants on the Micro-Structure and Mechanical Behavior of Fe-Si-Mn Steels

In order to increase the modifying effect, the Fe-V-Nb alloy was rapidly solidified with melt-spin method, and the nano-sized ribbon was gained at 40-45 rad/s. Subsequently, Fe-Si-Mn spring steels was modified by amorphous and nanocrystalline. The results show that the microscopic structure of Fe-Si-Mn spring steels modified by amorphous and nanocrystalline is better than micro-alloyed with the same amount of niobium and vanadium, the mechanical properties of Fe-Si-Mn spring steels modified by Fe-V-Nb intermediate alloy are improved evidently: the yield-strength is reached to 1484 Mpa, the yield ratio is reached to 0.94 and the hardness is reached to 64HRC when specimens quenched.