Computational Study of High Temperature Liquid Metal Infusion

Liquid metal infiltration, or liquid method infusion, consists of impregnating porous media composed of woven, ceramic particles, or fibers with a molten metal matrix, which fills the pores and occupies the void space within. Understanding the infiltration process is crucial to optimize the properties of the recently formed material and avoid or minimize the formation of fabrication defects. Given the fact that the flow of molten metal differs from organic flows, since molten metal possess a higher interface energy than organic flows, and modifies the wetting dynamics of the molten metal over surfaces, creating a flow driven by capillary and viscous forces. In addition, flow through porous media presents an extraordinary challenge to simulate efficiently, due to the presence of multiple scales far apart participating in the governing dynamics. For this reason, an in-house pore network simulator (EXPNS) was used. EXPNS was designed on a next generation computing framework using Sandia National Lab’s Trilinos and Kokkos library to perform high-resolution computing to generate data for the infiltration model and improve the general understanding of this process.