Density of Multicomponent Melts Measured by Electromagnetic Levitation

A significant amount of time and costs could be saved on the development of new materials through numerical modeling, if there was an understanding on how their thermophysical properties change with a change of composition. Here, we report on systematic measurements of the density for a number of liquid metallic alloys. These measurements were carried out containerlessly using the technique of electromagnetic levitation. Systems were investigated from mono-atomic liquid metals, to binary and ternary alloys. The results are discussed using the excess volume as the key mixing parameter. We found that there is no strict rule for liquid alloys, whether or not the excess volume should be positive, negative, or zero. However, a clear tendency was observed: immiscible systems tend to exhibit a positive excess volume, strongly mixing systems show a negative excess volume, and alloys of which the components are chemically similar, exhibit an excess volume of almost zero