Kinetics of glass formation

Abstract

The time needed to reach the glass transition temperature, at a constant cooling rate, with a small enough crystallized fraction (less than 10^–4) is used as a criterion for glass-forming ability. In order to compute this cooling time, the rates of nucleation, growth and cooling have been coupled together in a kinetic equation for the time dependence of the crystallized fraction of the melt. The computations performed for a large number of oxides, halides, molecular liquids and metals were found to correlate with the experimentally-observed glass forming abilities.