ESTIMATION OF THE CONFIGURATIONAL ENTROPY OF FUSION

The entropy of fusion of a metal consists of the configurational and vibrational entropies. A formula is presented to evaluate the configurational entropy by assuming an amorphous phase to be a frozen liquid that has lost the configurational entropy but still maintains the vibrational entropy of the corresponding liquid. The magnitude of the configurational entropy may provide information on the nature of liquid structures. The evaluation requires the enthalpy of the amorphous phase in addition to those of the liquid and crystalline phases. The illustrative evaluation on the Ni24Zr76 alloy shows that ΔSconf is approximately 1k per atom, where k is the Boltzmann constant, which suggests some degree of clustering of atoms in the liquid.© 1995 American Institute of Physics.