Does roughening of rock-fluid-rock interfaces emerge from a stress-induced instability?

Non-planar solid-fluid-solid interfaces under stress are very common in many industrial and natural materials. For example, in the Earth’s crust, many rough and wavy interfaces can be observed in rocks in a wide range of spatial scales, from undulate grain boundaries at the micrometer scale, to styl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European physical journal. B, Condensed matter physics Condensed matter physics, 2009, Vol.67 (1), p.121-131
Main Authors: Bonnetier, E., Misbah, C., Renard, F., Toussaint, R., Gratier, J.-P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Complex Systems
Condensed Matter Physics
Earth Sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
Fluid- and Aerodynamics
Interdisciplinary Physics
Physics
Physics and Astronomy
Sciences of the Universe
Solid State Physics
Tectonics. Structural geology. Plate tectonics
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Summary:Non-planar solid-fluid-solid interfaces under stress are very common in many industrial and natural materials. For example, in the Earth’s crust, many rough and wavy interfaces can be observed in rocks in a wide range of spatial scales, from undulate grain boundaries at the micrometer scale, to stylolite dissolution planes at the meter scale. It is proposed here that these initially flat solid-fluid-solid interfaces become rough by a morphological instability triggered by elastic stress. A model for the formation of these unstable patterns at all scales is thus presented. It is shown that such instability is inherently present due to the uniaxial stress that promotes them, owing to the gain in the total elastic energy: the intrinsic elastic energy plus the work of the external forces. This is shown explicitly by solving the elastic problem in a linear stability analysis, and proved more generally without having resort to the computation of the elastic field.
ISSN:1434-6028
1434-6036
DOI:10.1140/epjb/e2009-00002-2