Ames Lab develops 3400 °C atomizer for fusion materials

The new setup at Ames Lab melts only a small volume of metal at once inside a water-cooled copper hearth. Researchers are developing a refractory-metal powder atomizer—equipment that turns molten feedstock into powder—for materials that must withstand extreme environments, including fusion-energy systems and gas turbines. It can process materials at up to 3400 °C and produce up to one kilogram per minute.

The need is industrial as well as scientific. Powdered metals enable the precise manufacture of complex components and specialized alloys that traditional methods struggle to make. Teams working on new high-temperature alloys had been facing year-plus waits for enough powder to test their ideas, according to Ames Lab scientist Jordan Tiarks. The new system is intended to provide the quantities required for development, testing and scale-up.

Its core mechanism is a transferred-arc plasma process. Instead of relying on a specially manufactured electrode, high-energy plasma melts the feedstock locally before atomization; the input can be bars or chunks as long as its composition is consistent. The outer layer freezes against the cooled copper to form a thin protective “skull,” separating the molten material from the hearth. Keeping only a small volume molten at any time also limits the time the material spends at high temperature, which Tiarks says helps maintain purity and control reactivity.

The system expands Ames Lab’s ability to work with refractory metals, but it is not the most efficient option for every alloy. Existing induction and close-coupled atomizers handle conventional alloys at lower temperatures and can achieve 50%-60% yield in the optimal particle-size range. For high-temperature alloys, the refractory atomizer typically achieves 10%-20% in that range.

Concretely, researchers developing fusion-energy materials or hotter turbine alloys could use the equipment to make enough powder for repeated tests and scale-up, rather than waiting a year or more for supplies. The near-term change is access to a difficult research material: the announcement describes a tool for accelerating material development and adoption by industry, not a fusion machine or turbine component already in service.