AMORPHOUS

MATERIAL
EDMIL C. PABELLANO
BSME-V GM

What is an amorphous material?

Amorphous materials are ubiquitous in
natural and engineered
systems. Granular fault gouge in
earthquakes faults, thin film lubricants, and
bulk metallic glasses are seemingly
disparate systems which are similar in that
they possess an amorphous structure.
Colloids, emulsions, window glass, dense
polymers, and even biological tissues are
other examples.

Although ruptures on earthquake faults, nanoscale

friction measured using a Surface Force Apparatus,
and deformation in bulk metallic glasses appear to
be very different phenomena, they share a common
feature: the region where deformation or slip occurs
is populated by an amorphous material. Amorphous
solids are comprised of particles (atoms, grains,
bubbles, molecules) arranged so that the locations
of their centers of mass are disordered; their
structure is essentially indistinguishable from a
liquid. However, these materials are ``jammed'' and
exhibit a yield stress like a solid. Other examples of
amorphous materials include colloids and
emulsions, foams, glass-forming molecular liquids,
traffic jams, and even living tissue.

While amorphous materials differ in important and

significant ways, they exhibit common features which we
explain using a single continuum formalism. One such feature
is a mode of deformation or failure called shear banding or
strain localization. Strain localization is the spontaneous
development of coexisting flowing and stationary regions in a
sheared material.

Constitutive Laws for amorphous

solids
For engineering or design purposes, materials like
films, foams, and rocks are currently described by
phenomenological laws based on fits to data.
While these laws are useful for predicting
macroscopic behavior in most typical situations,
they do not predict the onset of fracture,
deterioration, and propagation of cascading failure,
which can be sudden, unexpected, and extremely
sensitive to the history of the material. Such
fragilities are often intrinsically linked to feedback
between systems at different scales, such as
granular fault gouge and networks of faults
spanning hundreds of miles.

Amorphous materials often comprise or

lubricate sheared material interfaces
and require more complicated
constitutive equations than simple fluids
or crystalline solids. They flow like a
fluid under large stresses, creep or
remain stationary under smaller
stresses, and have complex, historydependent behavior. Bulk metallic
glasses, granular materials, and bubble
rafts are just some of the disordered
materials that exhibit a yield stress.

Effective temperature
One difficulty in describing non equilibrium
systems is that the thermal temperature no longer
completely characterizes probability distributions
for the system's many degrees of freedom. For
example, the thermal temperature specifies the
velocity and position distributions of particles in an
equilibrium gas, while the thermal temperature
reveals very little about a glass-forming liquid well
below the glass temperature or a dense colloidal
suspension driven in simple shear. Physicists have
long searched for an internal variable that can be
used to characterize far from equilibrium systems.

They defined the effective temperature

as the intrinsic variable which is the
derivative of the volume or
configurational energy with respect to
the configurational entropy. This
definition is based on the intuition that
for many systems thermal temperature
is not sufficient to cause configurational
rearrangements, but slow shearing or
stirring causes the particles to
ergodically explore configuration space.

Localization and failure

Strain localization is the spontaneous development
of coexisting flowing and stationary regions in a
sheared material. Strain localization has been
identified and studied experimentally in granular
materials, bubble rafts, complex fluids, and bulk
metallic glasses. Shear banding may play an
important role in the failure modes of structural
materials and earthquake faults. Localization is a
precursor to fracture in bulk metallic glasses and
has been cited as a mechanism for material
weakening in granular fault gouge on faults.

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