Viscosity of Metallic Glass Forming Liquids: Analysis Based on Bond Strength-Coordination Number Fluctuations

Abstract

A model that describes the viscous behavior in terms of the mean values of the bond strength, the coordination number, and their fluctuations of the structural units that form the melt has been proposed by one of the authors. In the present study, the viscous behavior of several metallic glass forming systems are analyzed by using the model. From the analysis, microscopic information such as the number of bonds that must be broken to observe the viscous flow is obtained. It is also shown that when the magnitudes of energy and coordination number fluctuations are equal, the behavior of the viscosity described by our model corresponds perfectly to the behavior described by the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann (VFT) equation.