The potential energy states and mechanical properties of thermally cycled binary glasses

Abstract

The influence of repeated thermal cycling on mechanical properties, structural relaxation, and evolution of the potential energy in binary glasses is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a binary mixture with strongly non-additive cross interactions, which is annealed across the glass transition with different cooling rates and then exposed to one thousand thermal cycles at constant pressure. We found that during the first few hundred transient cycles, the potential energy minima after eachcycle gradually decrease and the structural relaxation proceeds via collective, irreversible displacements of atoms. With increasing cycle number, the amplitudes of the volume and potential energy oscillations are significantly reduced, and the potential energy minima saturate to a constant value that depends on the thermal amplitude and cooling rate. In the steady state, the glasses thermally expand and contract but most of the atoms return to theircages after each cycle, similar to limit cycles found in periodically driven amorphous materials. The results of tensile tests demonstrate that the elastic modulus and the yielding peak, evaluated after the thermal treatment, acquire maximum values at a particular thermal amplitude, which coincides with the minimum of the potential energy.

23 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Memory formation in matter
• The effect of cryogenic thermal cycling on aging, rejuvenation, and mechanical properties of metallic glasses
• The effects of cooling rate on particle rearrangement statistics: Rapidly cooled glasses are more ductile and less reversible
• Collective nonaffine displacements in amorphous materials during large-amplitude oscillatory shear
• Mechanical annealing of model glasses: Effects of strain amplitude and temperature
• The yielding transition in periodically sheared binary glasses at finite temperature
• Nonaffine rearrangements of atoms in deformed and quiescent binary glasses
• Slow relaxation dynamics in binary glasses during stress-controlled, tension-compression cyclic loading
• Shearing small glass-forming systems: a potential energy landscape perspective

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Atomistic Modelling of Thermal-Cycling Rejuvenation in Metallic Glasses
• Accelerated relaxation in disordered solids under cyclic loading with alternating shear orientation
• The influence of complex thermal treatment on mechanical properties of amorphous materials
• Atomistic modeling of heat treatment processes for tuning the mechanical properties of disordered solids
• Structural relaxation in amorphous materials under cyclic tension-compression loading
• Accelerated rejuvenation in metallic glasses subjected to elastostatic compression along alternating directions
• Alternating shear orientation during cyclic loading facilitates yielding in amorphous materials
• Accessing a broader range of energy states in metallic glasses by variable-amplitude oscillatory shear
• A delayed yielding transition in mechanically annealed binary glasses at finite temperature
• Cooling under applied stress rejuvenates amorphous alloys and enhances their ductility
• Relaxation dynamics in amorphous alloys under asymmetric cyclic shear deformation
• Shear band healing in amorphous materials by small-amplitude oscillatory shear deformation