title: A versatile approach to vacuum injection casting for materials research and development.
abstract: Vacuum injection casting (VIC) is important for research and development (R&D) of materials that are prone to oxidation at high temperatures, particularly metals and metallic alloys (e.g., metallic glasses and high entropy alloys). VIC in R&D laboratories often involves initial melting/alloying in a prior step, transporting the sample to a dedicated vacuum chamber, re-melting the sample in a quartz tube, and finally injecting the melt with an inert gas to a dedicated mold. Here we present a new approach to laboratory VIC that requires no sample transfer (for a variety of materials), no dedicated vacuum chamber/space nor dedicated mold, and hence provides more versatility and higher efficiency and yet lowers the capital equipment cost. Our approach takes advantage of the exceptional portability, thermal and chemical stability, and thermoplastic processability of quartz glass and uses quartz tubes for all the melting, re-melting, injection casting, and molding. In addition, our approach includes oxygen gettering to remove residual oxygen for all the steps and allows for slow or fast cooling (e.g., water quenching) upon injection. This paper focuses on the design, the procedures, and the versatile features of this new approach while also demonstrating the practical implementation of this approach and computational modeling of the heat transfer and the cooling rates for two exemplary cases. The new approach is expected to bring notable expedition to sample fabrication and materials discovery, as well as wider adoption of vacuum injection casting in materials science and condensed matter physics research laboratories.
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA.
authors.forename: Donghua
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA.
authors.forename: Yifan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu