1. Institute of Amorphous Matter Science, School of Materials Science and Engineering 2. Anhui Provincial Key Lab of Advanced Functional Materials and Devices, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, P. R. China
The study of the diffusion behavior in liquid metals is an important subject of condensed physics research. The diffusion coefficient of liquid metals is a key parameter to describe the mass transfer phenomena. Accurate diffusion coefficients are important for the studies of fundamental materials science and engineering applications. In this paper, several commonly measurement techniques and progress of domestic research on diffusion in liquid metals are introduced. Due to the influence of various factors such as convection caused by gravity, the diffusion coefficients measured on the ground often have great errors. This paper summarizes a series of research works in the microgravity environment carried out by foreign scientists. Due to the limitation of technology and cost, the precise diffusion measurement result obtained by the space experiment is still very lacking, that led to people on the understanding of the mass transfer mechanism of molten metal is far from enough. Several diffusion theory models are briefly introduced based on the existing experimental results. Finally, the future direction of liquid metal diffusion is given, and the scientific and technical problems to be solved are proposed.