Weighted Voronoi tessellation technique for internal structure of metallic glasses

Voronoi tessellation technique has been widely used to describe the atomic structure of amorphous materials, such as short-range order of icosahedra, because of the relative simplicity of calculation. In the ordinary Voronoi tessellation technique, a face is placed halfway between equal-sized atoms. However, as the atoms are not of the same size, bisection cannot be the exact plane to represent the polyhedron. It also produces errors during estimation of volume of each atom and the number of faces on the polyhedron. In this paper, we solve this problem using Richardsʹs method, a kind of weighted Voronoi tessellation technique. The results show over 50% differences in the number of faces and the atomic volume for the binary metallic glasses.