A combined physical-computational modelling approach has been developed to analyse the water atomization process which is widely used in high-volume production of non-reactive metals. In this process, a molten metal stream is impinged by a number of high-pressure water sprays. Due to the energy transfer at the impingement zone, the molten metal stream breaks up into droplets that ultimately become powder.

In this study, a lab-scale water atomizer was built to carry out high-speed imaging of the complex internal phenomena. Since performing experiments at the process conditions of an industrial-size water atomizer is not practical in the lab, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was also developed,
to scale the analysis to industrial size.