Mechanical Behaviour of Glasses and Amorphous Materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in understanding the mechanical behaviour of amorphous solids, emphasizing insights from computer simulations and oscillatory shear deformation studies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent findings on the plasticity and yielding of glasses, highlighting unifying principles and differences among various amorphous materials.

Findings

Insights into plasticity mechanisms in glasses

Understanding of yielding behavior under shear

Identification of unifying characteristics of amorphous plasticity

Abstract

A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses, emulsions and granular packings -- are useful as structural materials in a variety of contexts. Their deformation and flow behaviour is relevant for many others. Apart from fundamental questions associated with the formation of these solids, comprehending their mechanical behaviour is thus of interest, and of significance for their use as materials. In particular, the nature of plasticity and yielding behaviour in amorphous solids has been actively investigated. Different amorphous solids exhibit behaviour that is apparently diverse and qualitatively different from those of crystalline materials. A goal of recent investigations has been to comprehend the unifying characteristics of amorphous plasticity and to understand the apparent differences among them. We summarise some of the recent progress in this direction. We focus on insights obtained from computer simulation studies, and in particular those employing oscillatory shear deformation of model glasses.