The Grinding Body Is an Impurity: Spark Dispersion Instead of Milling

Every mill makes powder together with an impurity: balls, drum and lining wear down, and their metal stays in the product. For hard alloys, catalysts and magnetic materials, purity decides everything. AQUASPARK does not grind. The working tool is an electric spark. The discharge breaks conductive metal into particles, and nothing mechanical touches the metal. There is no contamination path by design: no grinding body, no impurity from it. One condition: the conductivity of the charge must be no higher than 0.1 Ω/cm. Practically any metal or alloy fits. What comes out. Spherical particles from 5 nm to 10 µm. The structure is amorphous, glassy or fine-crystalline, and the specific surface is huge — simply because the particles are many and small. In amorphous nano-alumina the structure looks like foam: solid pores of spherical films. It looks like ash or curd, just at nanometer scale. This foam has been found in aluminum and magnesium, and the aluminum material passed independent testing. One pass instead of a chain. The oxide film on the powder is formed right in the discharge: dosed oxygen goes into the inert gas, a corrosion inhibitor into the liquid medium. And if the medium is changed, the result is not a metal powder but an oxide, hydroxide, nitride, carbide or spinel. The medium is the control knob. Why this powder is good. High chemical activity and sorption capacity, unusual magnetic properties. In multi-metal mixtures the spark gives a uniformity other methods can hardly match. What goes to work. Refractory metals, the hardest alloys, ductile, brittle, chemically active, precious and even radioactive metals — on one principle. The developer has studied 14 metals. The feed is pure metal or scrap: in recycling mode, metal waste turns into powder. Industrial volumes, low cost. What is already ordered. Aluminum oxide, aluminum hydroxide, tungsten carbide with cobalt, tungsten carbide with nickel, magnetite, gold, platinum. The developer has made aluminum oxide from aluminum hydroxide for 20 years. The powder also feeds our lines: tungsten carbides go to the ARBOK tungsten line, aluminum oxides to the aluminum one. Side by side. Mill: the working body is the grinding body. It rubs against the metal and wears, and its wear stays in the powder. AQUASPARK: the working tool is a spark. No mechanical contact, no contamination. A mill only reduces size; everything else takes separate operations. AQUASPARK sets size, structure, oxide film and the very composition of the powder in one discharge. A mill gives powder and someone else's metal as a bonus. The spark gives powder and only powder. The whole difference is what stands between you and the metal: a grinding body or nothing.