Wettability at High Temperatures: Volume 3

Reviews / Votes

from: Andreas Mortensen
"Capillary equilibrium involving a liquid in contact with a solid is of nearly ubiquitous importance. In everyday life, in industry, in nature, liquid constantly meets solid and this encounter has numerous consequences. At elevated temperatures, the same holds true: metallic or ceramic liquids nearly always come at some point in contact with a solid, and this contact influences many important industrial processes. There are very basic difference between wetting at high temperature and wetting at more usual, near-ambient, temperatures: atoms move faster and atoms interact more strongly. For this reason, wetting at elevated temperature represents a specific problem, and it is pertinent that a book focus on this question.

"Wettability at High Temperatures" does so on the basis of a detailed exposition of underlying fundamentals, both theoretical and experimental. Indeed, the fact that at elevated temperature "everything reacts with everything" has particularly strong consequences in capillarity, because atomic species can, even at minute concentrations and with limited mobility, segregate and completely alter capillary equilibria. Coverage then dives in great detail into the specifics of the principal systems of interest, and then focusses on brazing, a process which relies nearly entirely on elevated temperature capillarity. In addition, this book provides a wealth of data, and as such represents not only a valuable introduction to the field, but a working tool for the practicing scientist and engineer.

The authors count among the top-most present contributors to this question. Dr. Nicholas is a well recognized expert of capillary phenomena in materials processing, and of the brazing process in particular. We owe to Drs. Drevet and Eustathopoulos much of what is the current state of advancement of basic research on wetting at elevated temperature, including the high standards that now exist in experimentation and the gradual establishment, on the basis of trustworthy experimental results, of a framework for analysis of the thermodynamics and the kinetics of wetting phenomena at elevated temperature. This is a field of research that is advancing rapidly, and one which is now yielding results and methodologies which can be exploited with confidence in engineering. This book will no doubt represent a milestone, both as a summary of where we now stand, but also as a driving force for future progress on this important question.? --Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

from: Antoni P. Tomsia
"The book describes the unique nature of the high-temperature wetting phenomena occurring at various material interfaces and explains the phenomena in terms of such properties as surface and interfacial energy, adhesion, and adsorption.

The book carefully delineates why and how the wetting of liquids on solids is such a key aspect of many industrial processes. It illustrates, for example, how joining dissimilar materials by soldering or brazing is critical for interconnections and packaging in microelectronic and opto-electronic devices, as well as for fabricating a wide range of structural materials.
The book also shows the importance of fluid flow in fabricating many strong, low-density composite materials, and how minor compositional alterations can markedly affect not only rates of infiltration or reaction, but even the outcome of such reactions.

This book should be a valuable reference for scientists working in these areas. No treatment of high-temperature wetting phenomena has up to now been undertaken. This clear and comprehensive study thus fills an important need.? --Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA