Mechanical Properties of Alkali Borate Glasses

A GLASS is, formally, a solid that solidifies without a well-defined melting point— defined as a singular temperature at which there occurs a discontinuous change in a physical property, for example specific volume, during transition between a liquid state and its corresponding solid state—but instead exhibits a continuous change in that property over a range of temperature. Glasses tend to inherit their atomic-scale structures from those of the liquids from which they evolve by cooling, and their structural arrangements are therefore necessarily less-ordered than those of corresponding crystalline arrangements. Such glassy arrangements are often termed amorphous, though formally again what is meant by this term is lack of the long-range translational and rotational regularity that characterize crystalline arrangements. All “amorphous” atom arrangements do not necessarily exhibit a formal glass transition, though many do. Good