Structure characterizations and molecular dynamics simulations of melt, glass, and glass fibers

Description

Network structures of glasses and glass fibers are tailored by glass designers using various combinations of oxides or raw materials to achieve desirable properties for specific applications. It has been well accepted in the glass community that the glass network structures are affected not only by composition, but also melt history (melting temperature) and forming conditions. Unlocking local environments of the glass network will greatly contributes to new glass and fiber glass design meeting ever growing commercial applications for higher performance and better processing characteristics. Several state-of-the-art spectroscopic techniques have been successfully developed addressing the critical needs in understanding the complex glass network that has no periodic structures over an intermediate and long range. Two of the commonly used techniques are Raman spectroscopy (including confocal micro-Raman spectroscopy) and high-resolution magic angle spin nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MAS NMR) (Hawthorne, Spectroscopic methods in mineralogy and geology, reviews in mineralogy Vol 18, 1988; Mysen and Richet P, Developments Geochem 10, 2005, which will be a focus of discussions in Sect. 2.1 (Neuville et al.) and Sect. 2.2 (Charpentier), respectively. Both techniques have been recently applied to study glasses in a fiber form, which were created under high temperature and high shear rate (Li et al., Int J Appl Glass Sci 8:23–36, 2016). Besides, with the advancement in computer technology and atomistic computation modeling of amorphous or glassy materials, molecular dynamics simulations (MD) has been widely accepted as one of the critical methods to understand the structure and properties of oxide glasses and other amorphous materials (Charpentier et al., J Non-Cryst Solids 492:115–125, 2018; Massobrio et al., Molecular dynamics simulations of disordered materials—from network glasses to phase-change memory alloys, 2015) and its versatility will be reviewed in Sect. 2.3 (Du et al.). Finally, high-temperature differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) method will be introduced in Sect. 2.4 (Yue), which has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool for the characterization of glass fibers formed under a high shear rate and a very high-cooling rate close to 1 × 106 K/s, (Li et al., Int J Appl Glass Sci 8:23–36, 2016; Yue, J Non-Cryst Solids 345–346:523–527, 2004).

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