Modeling nonequilibrium thermoviscoelastic material behaviors of glass in nonisothermal glass molding

Nonisothermal glass molding (NGM) is developed aiming to satisfy the fabrication of complex and precision optical elements at high production volumes. The technology, however, was encountered by the high form deviation of manufactured glass optics. During the nonisothermal compression molding, glass undergoes a rapid temperature change making it a transition from equilibrium to nonequilibrium nature of matter. Owing to this characteristic, viscoelastic material behaviors of glass depend on not only temperature but also thermal history. Understanding the nature of nonequilibrium thermoviscoelasticity, the central importance to control the final shape and optical characteristics of the manufactured glass optics is the focus of this research. First, this study presents preliminary experimental investigations indicating the difference in viscoelastic deformation responses under the equilibrated and nonequilibrated glass specimens. In the following, modeling the temperature-dependent viscoelasticity over a wide temperature range in glass transition region is described, where temperature is directly coupled in each parameter of a rheological constitutive model. This concept allows us to bypass the thermorheologically simple assumption used to tolerate the description of thermoviscoelastic responses in most of the earlier works. Finally, we propose a modeling method that incorporates temperature and thermal history into the rheological model parameters, each of which is described by employing the Mauro-Allan-Potuzak viscosity equation. Viscoelastic experiments were carried out to validate the model. The results show that the time-dependent responses varying with temperature are well predicted in both equilibrium and nonequilibrium regimes of glass-forming systems. The benefit of this research is that a unique material model is entirely applicable for numerical studies of various hot forming processes such as annealing when glass undergoes pure thermal loads, as well as precision glass molding and NGM when glass is deformed by fully coupled thermal–mechanical loads under either its equilibrium or nonequilibrium state of materials, respectively.