Effects of atomic size for voronoi tessellation technique on binary and ternary systems of metallic glasses

Abstract

A number of researchers are still employing the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique to explore the atomic structures of metallic glasses. However, the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique does not take into consideration the size of each atom, and this essentially leads to differences in the atomic volume and structure, such as the number of atoms with FCC or icosahedral structure. An alternative way, the radical plane technique, is applied to binary and ternary systems: such as Zr, ZrCu, ZrCuAl, ZrB, and ZrFeB. In the radical plane technique, the face is placed on the position in proportion to the atomic size. In this study, we found that the differences cannot be negligible. In some cases, the difference in the results between the two techniques is more than 50%. © 2006 The Japan Institute of Metals.