Can Liquid Metals Defy Gravity and Form Perfect Spheres While Falling?

[Brage Eidsvik]

Will liquid metals create droplets when falling or will they create different shapes?

 

[Simon Bridge]

Welcome to PF;
They can form quite good spheres ... this is how lead shot used to be made.
Munitions companies would feed molten lead through a seive at the top of a tower, and it would literally rain little metal balls at the bottom.
http://www.ipenz.org.nz/heritage/itemdetail.cfm?itemid=2228

 

[davenn]

They can form quite good spheres ... this is how lead shot used to be made.

Yup ... and ball bearings

 

[hsdrop]

I believe in free fall all liquid will ball up do to the surface tension the same way they do on iss or even in deed space without any gravitational fields around to react on it there's a name for this but i just can't remember it right now and i know that rain / water when it falls in the sky it pancakes a little bit because of the air friction when falling

throw some would say that the balling effect in free fall or weightlessness is do to the gravitational pull of all the fluids particles on ever other particles in the fluid like the sun and the planets do but for smaller thing i think it the surface tension

hope this helps

 

[Drakkith]

throw some would say that the balling effect in free fall or weightlessness is do to the gravitational pull of all the fluids particles on ever other particles in the fluid like the sun and the planets do but for smaller thing i think it the surface tension

The contribution from the droplet's own gravitational pull on itself is vanishingly small. The effect is essentially 100% from surface tension.

 

[A.T.]

Will liquid metals create droplets when falling or will they create different shapes?

They can have stronger surface tension than water, that pulls them into a sphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)