A Simple Experimental Method for Measuring the Surface Tension of Liquid Metals

The possibility of using the sessile drop method to determine the capillary constant and surface tension of metallic melts by measuring the parameters of the drop after its crystallization was considered. The method is quite applicable if the change in the drop's volume resulting from the phase transition is small and lies within the error of the digital reproduction of its profile. Pure indium, tin, and lead were investigated as examples. The role of flux in the experiments was studied. A new algorithm for determining the capillary constant from the drop profile, based on the solution of the Young–Laplace equation and the Nelder–Mead simplex optimization method, was developed and numerically implemented.