Novel sustainable metallic powder production process with water used as milling medium

Today, Fe-Al intermetallic compounds are receiving a great interest from the mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical industries. A novel production process for Fe-Al intermetallic powders based on the generation of metallic tapes by rapid solidification and disintegration by water vapor was proposed. In this research work, a comparison is made between the energy required to manufacture of Fe-Al powder using the aforementioned process and one of the most commonly used manufacturing processes within the industry such as mechanical alloying. In addition, some other benefits of the proposed manufacturing process are analyzed. To carry out this comparison, the theoretical equations that take into account the most important variables involved during the process such as the type of material and hardness, the initial and final particle size, the grinding stages and the heating of the treatment powder were considered. In the case of calculating the energy required for the new proposed process, the two main stages were considered such as (1) the production of FeAl metal tape and (2) the subsequent transformation of the tape into powder by means of injection water vapor. For the first stage, the CASTRIP process is considered, and for the second stage, the energy required for the generation steam. Although the calculations may have certain limitations, it is obvious that the energy required to Fe-Al powder production using the new process is much lower than that required by mechanical alloying, resulting in at least three orders of magnitude lower (2.75 × 10⁶ versus 2.206 × 10⁹ kJ/ton). This lower energy implies considerable economic savings in the production process. On the other hand, when using water as a grinding medium during the process, it results in less environmental and acoustic pollution, less manipulation risks for humans and finally, no harmful agents or additives are used, making the proposed process sustainable.