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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The great majority of metallic solids are disordered. Under forcing, alloy specimens exhibit complex dynamics in their respective thermophysical properties. In an attempt to bring about a useful first-principle modeling, we first focus on capturing a coarse-grained physical picture of the disorder in a class of binary refractory metals. A disordered binary alloy is postulated as a randomly close-packed assembly of nanocrystallites, intermixed with atoms in glassy state. A statistical physics model of the alloy specimen is then constructed in terms of a nanocrystallite size distribution function and the consequent degree of crystallinity. An experiment with a simulated macroscopic medium of hard spheres in two dimensions and a large system of coupled law-of-mass-action equations are combined in order to predict the equilibrium thermal evolution of the alloy. The modeling yields excellent quantitative measures such as the alloy’s melting point. The analysis will be discussed, together with further explorations into the genesis of the disorder.
