Advances in Condensed Matter Physics
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 817829, 23 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/817829
Review Article
Viscosity and Glass Transition in Amorphous Oxides
Department of Engineering Materials, The University of Sheffield, Sir Robert Hadfield Building, Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK
Received 12 June 2008; Revised 20 October 2008; Accepted 7 December 2008
Academic Editor: Mark Bowick
Copyright © 2008 Michael I. Ojovan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
An overview is given of amorphous oxide materials viscosity and glass-liquid transition phenomena. The viscosity is a continuous
function of temperature, whereas the glass-liquid transition is accompanied by explicit discontinuities
in the derivative parameters such as the specific heat or thermal expansion coefficient.
A compendium of viscosity models is given including recent data on viscous flow model
based on network defects in which thermodynamic parameters of configurons—elementary
excitations resulting from broken bonds—are found from viscosity-temperature relationships.
Glass-liquid transition phenomena are described including the configuron model of
glass transition which shows a reduction of Hausdorff dimension of bonds at glass-liquid transition.