Which Glass Stability Parameters Can Assess The Glass-Forming Ability Of Oxide Systems?

Glass-forming ability (GFA) is a property of utmost importance in glass science and technology. In this paper, we used a statistical methodology-involving bootstrap sampling and the Wilcoxon test-to find out which glass stability (GS) parameters best predict the GFA. The GS parameters are based on the characteristic temperatures: glass transition temperature (T-g), onset of crystallization (T-x), crystallization peak (T-c) and liquidus (T-l). We collected the necessary data for twelve stoichiometric oxide glasses using finely ground powders to favor heterogeneous nucleation (the most common case). We found that some GS parameters predict the GFA of these oxide glasses quite well, whereas others perform poorly. The Weinberg parameter K-w = (T-c - T-g)/T-l ranked first, closely followed by the Hruby and the Lu-Liu parameter. Our results corroborate previous reports carried out using a smaller number of glasses, much less GS parameters, and less rigorous statistics. We also found that using T-c instead of T-x improved the predictive power of these parameters. Finally, the Jezica = eta (T-l)/T-l(2) (eta = viscosity) parameter also ranked reasonable well, and it is the only parameter considered here that predicts the GFA without requiring the production of a glass piece, ie, without relying on any crystallization information.