A critical analysis of the glass-forming ability of alloys

Several empirical rules have been proposed during the past few years to synthesize bulk metallic glasses. But, the real reasons for the improved glass-forming ability of these alloys are still not clear and the ability to design alloy compositions to enable synthesis of larger diameter rods has not improved. The present work conducts a critical analysis of the existing data in terms of the different glass-forming criteria and concludes that the available parameters cannot satisfactorily predict the GFA and explain all the observed data. Reasons for this failure have been suggested. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.