Vibrating Breakup of Jet for Uniform Metal Droplets

Uniform droplet formation from capillary stream breakup provides promising opportunities for many applications such as solder balls manufacturing, circuit board printing and rapid prototype manufacturing. In this study an apparatus capable of making monosize metal spheres by vibrating breakup has been developed. The droplets were electrically charged to avoid collision and merging with one another during flight. As a result, uniformly sized tin powders (180μm in diameter) were obtained after cooling and solidification.