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Universal scaling law of glass rheology

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 404–409 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The similarity in atomic/molecular structure between liquids and glasses has stimulated a long-standing hypothesis that the nature of glasses may be more fluid-like, rather than the apparent solid. In principle, the nature of glasses can be characterized by the dynamic response of their rheology in a wide rate range, but this has not been realized experimentally, to the best of our knowledge. Here we report the dynamic response of shear stress to the shear strain rate of metallic glasses over a timescale of nine orders of magnitude, equivalent to hundreds of years, by broadband stress relaxation experiments. The dynamic response of the metallic glasses, together with other ‘glasses’, follows a universal scaling law within the framework of fluid dynamics. The universal scaling law provides comprehensive validation of the conjecture on the jamming (dynamic) phase diagram by which the dynamic behaviours of a wide variety of ‘glasses’ can be unified under one rubric parameterized by the thermodynamic variables of temperature, volume and stress in the trajectory space.

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Fig. 1: Broadband relaxation experiments of a Zr55Cu30Al10Ni5 glass.
Fig. 2: Strain-rate/stress behaviour and universal scaling law of glass rheology.
Fig. 3: Dynamic transition phase diagram based on the universal law derived from the broadband relaxation measurements.

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The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are included within the paper and its Supplementary Information file. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

S.S. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51821001) and MOST 973 of China (grant no. 2015CB856800). M.C. is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF DMR-1804320) with J. Yang as the programme director. F.Z. is sponsored by the Shanghai Pujiang Program under grant no. 21PJ1401800. We also thank the staff from the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced High-Temperature Materials and Precision Forming for assistance during data collection.

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  1. Fan Zhu

    Present address: Department of Materials Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Metal Matrix Composites, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, PR China

    Shuangxi Song & Fan Zhu

  2. WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Fan Zhu & Mingwei Chen

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Mingwei Chen

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Contributions

S.S. designed and performed the broadband stress relaxation experiments and data processing; F.Z. prepared the MG samples and conducted the microstructure characterization; and S.S. and M.C. analysed the data, developed the models and wrote the paper. M.C. conceived and supervised the project.

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Correspondence to Mingwei Chen.

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Nature Materials thanks Jean Marc Pelletier and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Song, S., Zhu, F. & Chen, M. Universal scaling law of glass rheology. Nat. Mater. 21, 404–409 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01185-y

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