• Nastybutler@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      That article doesn’t contradict what I was taught, just that the reason for the melted appearance of old glass isn’t due to this state, as that would take longer than the universe has existed to reach that effect, but due to old glass making techniques. We weren’t taught wrong, just given the wrong timeframe for it to happen. Doesn’t change the fact that glass isn’t a solid. Don’t know why my original comment is currently negative. I guess I’m taking the down votes earned by my chemistry teachers back in the 90s.

      • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        17 days ago

        Does room temperature glass deform to fit the shape of its container? That is the definition I remember from 7th grade, and it doesn’t seem to qualify glass as a liquid at room temperature and pressure.

        According to Wikipedia, the glass transition temperature for soda lime glass is 573 °C (1,063 °F) . This is the point where it goes from its glassy, amorphous solid state to the rubbery, viscous liquid state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_transition

        From Wikipedia:

        The glass–liquid transition, or glass transition, is the gradual and reversible transition in amorphous materials (or in amorphous regions within semicrystalline materials) from a hard and relatively brittle “glassy” state into a viscous or “rubbery” state as the temperature is increased.[2] An amorphous solid that exhibits a glass transition is called a glass. The reverse transition, achieved by supercooling a viscous liquid into the glass state, is called vitrification.

        Two-dimensional, schematic, representation of the lattices of quartz (a), silica (b), and of silica based glasses ©.[1]

        The glass-transition temperature Tg of a material characterizes the range of temperatures over which this glass transition occurs (as an experimental definition, typically marked as 100 s of relaxation time). It is always lower than the melting temperature, Tm, of the crystalline state of the material, if one exists, because the glass is a higher energy state (or enthalpy at constant pressure) than the corresponding crystal.

        […]

        Despite the change in the physical properties of a material through its glass transition, the transition is not considered a phase transition; rather it is a phenomenon extending over a range of temperature and defined by one of several conventions.[4][5] Such conventions include a constant cooling rate (20 kelvins per minute (36 °F/min))[2] and a viscosity threshold of 1012 Pa·s, among others. Upon cooling or heating through this glass-transition range, the material also exhibits a smooth step in the thermal-expansion coefficient and in the specific heat, with the location of these effects again being dependent on the history of the material.[6] The question of whether some phase transition underlies the glass transition is a matter of ongoing research.[4][5][7]^[when?]^

        […]

        Thus, the liquid-glass transition is not a transition between states of thermodynamic equilibrium. It is widely believed that the true equilibrium state is always crystalline. Glass is believed to exist in a kinetically locked state, and its entropy, density, and so on, depend on the thermal history. Therefore, the glass transition is primarily a dynamic phenomenon. Time and temperature are interchangeable quantities (to some extent) when dealing with glasses, a fact often expressed in the time–temperature superposition principle. On cooling a liquid, internal degrees of freedom successively fall out of equilibrium. However, there is a longstanding debate whether there is an underlying second-order phase transition in the hypothetical limit of infinitely long relaxation times.^[clarification needed][6][18][19][20]^

        In a more recent model of glass transition, the glass transition temperature corresponds to the temperature at which the largest openings between the vibrating elements in the liquid matrix become smaller than the smallest cross-sections of the elements or parts of them when the temperature is decreasing. As a result of the fluctuating input of thermal energy into the liquid matrix, the harmonics of the oscillations are constantly disturbed and temporary cavities (“free volume”) are created between the elements, the number and size of which depend on the temperature. The glass transition temperature Tg0 defined in this way is a fixed material constant of the disordered (non-crystalline) state that is dependent only on the pressure. As a result of the increasing inertia of the molecular matrix when approaching Tg0, the setting of the thermal equilibrium is successively delayed, so that the usual measuring methods for determining the glass transition temperature in principle deliver Tg values that are too high. In principle, the slower the temperature change rate is set during the measurement, the closer the measured Tg value Tg0 approaches.[21] Techniques such as dynamic mechanical analysis can be used to measure the glass transition temperature.[22]

        […]

        Glass is a “frozen liquid” (i.e., liquids where ergodicity has been broken), which spontaneously relax towards the supercooled liquid state over a long enough time.

        Glasses are thermodynamically non-equilibrium kinetically stabilized amorphous solids, in which the molecular disorder and the thermodynamic properties corresponding to the state of the respective under-cooled melt at a temperature T* are frozen-in. Hereby T* differs from the actual temperature T.[27]

        Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline condensed state of matter that exhibits a glass transition. The structure of glasses is similar to that of their parent supercooled liquids (SCL), and they spontaneously relax toward the SCL state. Their ultimate fate is to solidify, i.e., crystallize.[23]

        • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          17 days ago

          Well, if it is a type of glass, it will flow until it is able to cool enough to crystallize

          • Slashme@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            No matter how much you cool a glass, it won’t crystallise. You have to go over the glass transition temperature and cool down slowly enough for crystals to form. In the case of silica glass, that’s not going to happen, though, because it’s a “strong glass former” - it doesn’t crystallise unless you do something pretty extreme.

            • sem@piefed.blahaj.zone
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              15 days ago

              Ah OK, I thought on geologic timescales it would separate out and form back into quartz, etc at STP but I’m happy to be wrong and learn something new.