How Many Bulk Metallic Glasses Are There?

Quantitative prediction of glass forming ability using a priori known parameters is highly desired in metallic glass development; however proven to be challenging because of the complexity of glass formation. Here, we estimate the number of potential metallic glasses (MGs) and bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) forming systems and alloys, from empirically determined alloy design rules based on a priori known parameters. Specifically, we take into account atomic size ratio, heat of mixing, and liquidus temperature, which we quantify on binary glasses and centimeter-sized BMGs. When expanding into higher order systems that can be formed among 32 practical elements, we reduce the composition space for BMG formation using developed criteria by 10⁶ times and estimate ∼3 million binary, ternary, quaternary, and quinary BMGs alloys.