Influences of Water on the Glassy State in Glycerol, Propylenglycol and Other Polyhydric Alcohols

We have reported in the previous International Meetings on Ferroelectricity that glycerol shows the glassy state below a certain temperature, T _a Recently we have found that the activation energy to complete the glassy state is 0.18–0.19 eV for all polyhydric alcohols. Furthermore we have found that the activation energy decreases little by little with the increase of amount of addition of water. Such a result is very important to know the mechanism of the formation of glassy state and to clarify the molecular structure in glass.

Keywords:

• Polyhydric alcohols
• liquid—glass transition temperature T_a
• self—organization mechanism

Acknowledgement

The authors would like thank Dr. Koichi Toyoda for his helpful assistances to write this paper.