Melting of a Wire Anode Followed by Solidification: A Three-Phase Moving Interface Problem

Abstract

A fine metallic wire electrode is heated from below (by an electric discharge) causing melting and roll-up into a ball by surface tension. After the heating is terminated, a solidification front progresses through the melt until a solid ball is formed and cooled to ambient conditions. In this paper we numerically simulate the heating, melt motion and roll up and subsequent cooling and solidification. This is a three-phase problem (solid, liquid, and the ambient medium—plasma/gas) with two simultaneously moving phase interfaces, the outer one tracked by orthogonal grid generation conformal with the evolving boundary surface at each time interval. A novel observation in this study is that the wire end first drops until the melt radius equals the wire radius and then it begins to roll up into a ball consuming the wire. In other words, the inter-electrode gap first reduces and subsequently increases during an electronic flame off (EFO) discharge heating/phase-change process.