This is a small and very interesting book on thermophysical properties of liquid metals and their alloys. The author draws from his extensive experience on measuring properties of liquid metals to propose—and many times to develop—relationships between the thermodynamic properties and the density (molar volume), surface tension, and viscosity of pure liquid metals and some of their alloys. His approach is based on the well-established subregular solution model, which assumes that the excess thermodynamic properties of the alloys may be a function of temperature and composition. The thermodynamic model is semiempirical but has a large amount of assessed data from different research groups up to 2014, so it provides a robust approach to explain the liquid properties.
The book is structured with eight chapters and two appendices. The first chapter outlines the four questions that are answered within the book and provides the basis to use the experimental data to design new metallic alloys. Brillo aims to (1) find a general rule for the mixing behavior, (2) establish relationships between the excess thermophysical properties and thermodynamics, (3) correlate thermophysical properties of multicomponent liquid alloys with their constituent subsystems, and (4) identify inter-property relationships (surface tension, viscosity, and diffusion viscosity) for specific cases. The second chapter describes the experimental procedures applied to liquid alloys and their limitations, with an emphasis on levitation methods. The following three chapters discuss the density, surface tension, and viscosity following the same pattern: theory, experimental data for pure metals, their binary liquids, and, if available, their ternary liquids. The end of each chapter discusses Brillo’s four questions and summarizes them.
The last three chapters cover the inter-property relations of liquid alloys, the solid–liquid and liquid–liquid interfacial energies of specific systems, and the thermophysical properties of some liquid Ga-Mn-Ni alloys (which provide magnetic shape-memory alloys), and present an overall discussion and conclusion. The two appendices present all of the experimental data on liquid alloys determined by Brillo’s research group. Brillo did not provide a general rule for prediction of excess volumes or other thermophysical properties of the evaluated liquid pure metal and some of their binary and ternary alloys.
This book will be valuable to newcomers to the field thanks to its explanations of the different properties of liquid metals, and also to senior researchers and engineers working with liquid metals or in parallel fields due to its large amount of experimental and assessed data.
Reviewer: Roberto Ribeiro de Avillez of Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
