Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fragmentation Of Explosively Metastable Glass [Post-Print], Mark P. Silverman, Wayne Strange, J. Bower, L. Ikejimba

Faculty Scholarship

An unusual form of glass with bulbous head and thin tail, known as Rupert's drops, can withstand high impact or pressure applied to the head, but explodes instantly into small particles when the tail is broken. The mechanism is not well understood. To examine this, we performed macro- and microstatistical analyses of a sample of 500 g of fragments of exploded Rupert's drops to determine the mass and particle distributions and associated fractal dimensions. To our knowledge, this is the first such statistical study of the fragmentation of a metastable material with large internal energy. The resulting fractal dimensionD …