Mechanical Behaviour of Glasses and Amorphous Materials

Avalanches and Structural Change in Cyclically Sheared Silica Glass

“…The mechanical response of amorphous solids such as metallic glasses, window glass, foams, emulsions, colloidal suspension etc., to external deformation or applied stress is of central importance to characterise their behaviour and determining their utility [1][2][3]. The response for large enough deformations involves plastic rearrangements, leading eventually to yielding.…”

“…We study a version of the BKS model introduced by Saika-Voivod [68,69] (see SM for details). We prepared several equilibrated samples by performing constant temperature (NVT) molecular dynamics simula-tions with an integration time step of 1fs for a wide range of temperatures that straddles the threshold temperature T th = 3100K [31] for a fixed density ρ = 2.8 g/cm 3 . Avalanche properties display significant size dependence and, for this reason, we also simulate sizes ranging from N = 1728 to N = 74088.…”

Metastability as a mechanism for yielding in amorphous solids under cyclic shear

“…Yielding in amorphous solids is of importance in understanding their behaviour under applied stress in a variety of materials science and soft matter contexts [1,2], and has been investigated actively in recent years through a variety of theoretical approaches and computer simulations [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Simulations have been performed most often employing the athermal quasistatic (AQS) shear [11-14, 20, 21], although not exclusively [12,22,23].…”