THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ELECTRON BEAM MELTING FOR REMOVING IMPURITIES FROM TECHNOGENIC METAL MATERIALS

Abstract

Electron beam melting and vacuum refining (EBMR) is a modern metallurgical method that has proven advantages in terms of environmental sustainability and efficiency for recycling refractory and reactive metals and alloys with unique physical, chemical, and mechanical properties.
In this work, the effectiveness for removing impurities from technogenic molybdenum, titanium, and hafnium metals using EBMR method is investigated. The thermodynamic and kinetic process conditions and their influence on the possibility of impurities’ removal from the studied technogenic materials are discussed. It has been established that there are no thermodynamic limitations for the removal of silicon, antimony, iron, aluminum, and copper impurities at EBMR of molybdenum and the maximal overall removal efficiency is 58 %. In the case of titanium technogenic material, the highest refining efficiency and maximal overall impurity removal level of 99.97 % and 100 % for some inclusions (such as Fe, Cu, Ta, and Cd) are achieved. The studies show that impurities (metallic and non-metallic) can be effectively removed from technogenic hafnium using single e-beam refining processing and the highest refining
effectiveness is 52.21 %.

The obtained results allow formulating the conditions of the refining process aiming to obtain metal materials with high purity, better structures and properties and demonstrate high effectiveness of the EBMR method.