The levitation melting has a potentially wide range of applications, especially in the processing of reactive metals whose contact with the crucible material causes their contamination and damage to the crucible itself. Despite its advantages, levitation melting, already proposed in the 1920s, has not yet found significant use in industrial conditions. This is due to the nature of the electromagnetic field used in previously developed devices. The disappearance of this field in the system axis causes overcoming, in the case of larger charges, surface tension forces and metal leakage from the device. The article contains a comparative analysis of a conventional solution and a newly developed levitation melting device, whose completely different design eliminates the previous weight limit of the charge.

In this work, the effect of heat transfer during explosive welding (EXW) and post-processing annealing on the microstructural and chemical composition changes have been thoroughly analysed using scanning and transmission electron microscopies and X-ray synchrotron radiation. Several combination of explosively welded metal compositions were studied: Ti with Al, Cu with Al, Ta or stainless steel, stainless steel with Zr or Ta and Ti with carbon steel. It was found that the melted metals exhibit a strong tendency to form brittle crystalline, nano-grained or even amorphous phases during the solidification. For all analysed metal combinations most of the phases formed in the zones of solidified melt do not appear in the equilibrium phase diagrams. Concurrently, the interfacial layers undergo severe plastic deformation forming nano-grained structures. It has been established that these heavily deformed areas can undergo dynamic recovery and recrystallization already during clad processing. This leads to the formation of new stress-free grains near the interface. In the case of low temperature and short time post processing annealing only the melted zones and severely deformed layers undergo recovery and recrystallization. However, drastic changes in the microstructure occurs at higher temperature and for longer annealing times. Applying such conditions leads to diffusion dominant processes across the interface. As a consequence continuous layers of intermetallic phases of equilibrium composition are obtained.