Heating of the edge of a metal sheet in the container-less melt extraction of fibres

The present work is concerned with the metallurgical process of melt extraction. Certain industrial requirements, e.g. high purity and small cross-sectional area of the extracted fibres, require a geometrically strictly confined melt volume that is not in contact with any other material being a potential source of pollution. Hitherto, the pending drop method is embodied on small scale facilities. It suffers from low productivity because only one edge can be used to tear a filament out off the molten droplet forming at the tip of a heated rod. Here, a modification is proposed that uses extraction from a pending molten edge at the lower end of a metal sheet. Being a trivial task by all appearances, closer examination shows that it is not. Almost any embodiment of the pending drop technique makes use of locally confined sources of heat, i.e. an acetylene-oxygen torch, or, in the case of high valued materials, laser or electron beams. As attempts to employ induction heating to a single drop did not work even there, it is all the more difficult to melt a sheet along its entire edge rather than between the two opposing branches of an inductor. Tailoring of the induction heating magnetic field, the basic feature of which is the same direction of the electric current in both branches of the inductor, solved the problem. A proper choice of geometry, electrical conductivities of both extraction and substrate material, and the frequency of the alternating magnetic field have proven to be essential for the extraction process. Melting a platinum sheet at the edge and extraction of fibres only 25 micron in effective cross-section from a tin sheet was successfully demonstrated in model experiments.