Surface tension of molten silicon measured by microgravity oscillating drop method and improved sessile drop method

Surface Tensions of Fe–(30–40 mol%) Si–C Alloys at 1523–1723 K

“…42) Recently, the surface tension of liquid silicon was measured by the containerless method using the levitation technique 34,43) and the temperature coefficient of the surface tension of silicon was reported as ¹0.060 0.086 mN/m·K, which is much smaller than that of the Fe SiC alloy. Therefore, the Marangoni effect must be considered when controlling the convection of FeSi based solutions during the solution growth of SiC.…”

Theoretical Study of a Thermophysical Property of Molten Semiconductors

“…Also, Rhim and Ishikawa fitted their surface tension data for molten Ge [11] as: γ = 583 − 0.08 (T − T m ) (mJ m −2 ), and for molten Si [10,24] Figures 2 and 3 reveal that there is about 6% and 4% difference beween the calculated and the experimental results for Si and Ge, respectively. This may be attributed to the fact that the surface tension of molten silicon and germanium is difficult to measure accurately, and consequently, the available experimental data for the surface tension of molten silicon [1][2][3][4][5] and molten germanium [5][6][7] is currently widely scattered, not only their absolute values but also their temperature dependence, and agreement between the existing experimental data is quite poor (for Si, γ ranges from 720 to 875 mJ/m 2 , whereas the range is 560-632 mJ/m 2 for Ge). The data reported in the literature suffer from experimental problems and the presence of impurities.…”

“…The surface tension is sensitive to even minute surface contamination. However, it has been measured for molten silicon and germanium at the melting points [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] and at different temperatures [8][9][10][11][12]. The surface tension of high-temperature melts is the most needed and the most poorly established property.…”

Twenty Years of Surface Tension Measurements in Space

“…Surface tension measurements have already been made on quite a large number of pure metals and alloys (Egry et al 1995Egry 1998;Aune et al 2005;Fujii et al 2005Fujii et al , 2006Higuchi et al 2007). Exploiting the containerless technique, it has been possible to measure very reactive metals and alloys, at high temperatures, for which measurements by the sessile drop on earth are impossible due to the contamination of the liquid phase by the crucible materials.…”