Thermo-Mechanical Adjustment after Impacts during Planetary Growth

The thermal evolution of planets during their growth is strongly influenced by impact heating. The temperature increase after a collision is mostly located next to the shock. For Moon to Mars size planets where impact melting is limited, the long term thermo-mechanical readjustment is driven by spreading and cooling of the heated zone. To determine the time and length scales of the adjustment, we developed a numerical model in axisymmetric cylindrical geometry with variable viscosity. We show that if the impactor is larger than a critical size, the spherical heated zone isothermally flattens until its thickness reaches a value for which motionless thermal diffusion becomes more effective. The thickness at the end of advection depends only on the physical properties of the impacted body. The obtained timescales for the adjustment are comparable to the duration of planetary accretion and depend mostly on the physical properties of the impacted body

Compositional and thermal equilibration of particles, drops and diapirs in geophysical flows

International audienceCore formation, crystal/melt separation, mingling of immiscible magmas, and diapirism are fundamental geological processes that involve differential motions driven by gravity. Diffusion modifies the compo- sition or/and temperature of the considered phases while they travel. Solid particles, liquid drops and viscous diapirs equilibrate while sinking/rising through their surroundings with a time scale that depends on the physics of the flow and the material properties. In particular, the internal circulation within a liquid drop or a diapir favors the diffusive exchange at the interface. To evaluate time scales of chemical/thermal equilibration between a material falling/rising through a deformable medium, we propose analytical laws that can be used at multiple scales. They depend mostly on the non-dimensional Péclet and Reynolds numbers, and are consistent with numerical simulations. We show that equilibration between a particle, drop or diapir and its host needs to be considered in light of the flow structure complexity. It is of fundamental importance to identify the dynamic regime of the flow and take into account the role of the inner circulation within drops and diapirs, as well as inertia that reduces the thickness of boundary layers and enhances exchange through the interface. The scaling laws are applied to predict nickel equilibration between metals and silicates that occurs within 130 m of fall in about 4 minutes during the metal rain stage of the Earth's core formation. For a mafic blob (10 cm diameter) sinking into a felsic melt, trace element equilibration would occur over 4500 m and in about 3 years

Effet de la stratification en viscosité et d'une conductivité thermique variable sur la circulation convective dans le manteau de la Terre et de Vénus (modélisation tridimensionnelle)

TOULOUSE3-BU Sciences (315552104) / SudocSudocFranceF

A multiphase model of core formation

International audienceThe differentiation of solid planets with segregation of metal from silicates happens during the Hadean time while the planet is still growing by accretion. The separation of metal occurs when at least the metallic phase is liquid and proceeds by a combination of transport by diapiric instabilities and by more diffuse percolation flow. In this paper we develop a formalism derived from Bercovici et al. that can handle simultaneously two components, silicates and metal, and where the metal can be present both in solid and liquid states. The mechanical equations are non-Boussinesq as the lateral density variations are of the same order as the density itself. When the metal is solid, the metal and the silicates are locked together and we treat their mixture as a single-phase fluid where density is function of composition (iron-silicate proportions). When metal is liquid, it can separate from the silicates and the two phases interact through shear stress ( e. g. Darcy flow) and normal stress. The evolution of the volume proportion of liquid iron is controlled by the difference of pressure between the solid and liquid phases. The energy conservation equation takes into account the different mechanisms by which the gravitational energy is dissipated as heat. The 2-D Cartesian numerical code that we implemented to solve these equations makes use of numerical techniques that have not been previously used in geophysical two-phase modelling; we discuss the numerical aspects and benchmark the solutions. We present simulations of core-mantle differentiation showing that the first impact that melts the iron phase near the surface is potentially able to trigger the whole core-mantle segregation in a runaway phenomenon. The threshold of this instability in terms of the impactor and planetary size and the initial planetary temperature is investigated. The segregation of the metal occurs by a mechanism that was not suggested before and which is intermediate between the usual diapir instability and a porosity wave. Although we cannot explore the whole parameter space of our numerical model, we show various simulations that clarify the role of the most important parameters, such as the solid and metal viscosities or the depth dependence of gravit

An automatically updated S-wave model of the upper mantle and the depth extent of azimuthal anisotropy

International audienceWe present 3D2015_07Sv, an S wave model of the upper mantle based on the waveform modeling of 1,359,470 Rayleigh waves recorded since 1976. The use of approximate forward theory and modeling allows updating the model with new data on a regular basis. 3D2015_07Sv contains azimuthal anisotropy, achieves a lateral resolution of ∼600 km, and is consistent with other recent models up to degree 60 in the uppermost 200 km and degree 15 in the transition zone. Although radial anisotropy has been found to extend deeper beneath continents than beneath oceans, we find no such difference for azimuthal anisotropy, suggesting that beneath most continents, the alignment of olivine crystal is preferentially horizontal and azimuthally random at large scale. As most continents are located on slow moving plates, this supports the idea that azimuthal anisotropy aligns at large scale with the present plate motion only for plates faster than ∼4 cm yr −1

A playground for compressible natural convection with a nearly uniform density

International audienceIn the quest to understand the basic universal features of compressible convection, one would like to disentangle genuine consequences of compression from spatial variations of transport properties. For instance, one may choose to consider a fluid with uniform dynamic viscosity, but, then, compressible effects will generate a density gradient and consequently the kinematic viscosity will not be uniform. In the present work, we consider a very peculiar equation of state, whereby entropy is solely dependent on density, so that a nearly isentropic fluid domain is nearly isochoric. Within this class of equations of state, there is a thermal adiabatic gradient and a key property of compressible convection is still present, namely its capacity to viscously dissipate a large fraction of the thermal energy involved, of the order of the well-named dissipation number. In the anelastic approximation, under the assumption of an infinite Prandtl number, the number of governing parameters can be brought down to two, the Rayleigh number and the dissipation number. This framework is proposed as a playground for compressible convection, an opportunity to extend the vast corpus of theoretical analyses on the Oberbeck–Boussinesq equations regarding stability, bifurcations or the determination of upper bounds for the turbulent heat transfer. Here, in a two-dimensional geometry, we concentrate on the structure of numerical solutions. For all Rayleigh numbers, a change in the vertical temperature profile is observed in the range of dissipation number between $0$ and less than $0.4$ , associated with the weakening of ascending plumes. For larger dissipation numbers, the heat flux dependence on this number is found to be well predicted by Malkus's model of critical layers. For dissipation numbers of order unity, and large Rayleigh numbers, dissipation becomes related to the entropy heat flux at each depth, so that the vertical dissipation profile can be predicted, and so does the total ratio of dissipation to convective heat flux

Fully compressible convection for planetary mantles

International audienceThe numerical simulations of convection inside the mantle of the Earth or of terrestrial planets have been based on approximate equations of fluid dynamics. A common approximation is the neglect of the inertia term which is certainly reasonable as the Reynolds number of silicate mantles, or their inverse Prandtl number, are infinitesimally small. However various other simplifications are made which we discuss in this paper. The crudest approximation that can be done is the Boussinesq approximation (BA) where the various parameters are constant and the variations of density are only included in the buoyancy term and assumed to be proportional to temperature with a constant thermal expansivity. The variations of density with pressure and the related physical consequences (mostly the presence of an adiabatic temperature gradient and of dissipation) are usually accounted for by using an anelastic approximation (AA) initially developed for astrophysical and atmospheric situations. The BA and AA cases provide simplified but self-consistent systems of differential equations. Intermediate approximations are also common in the geophysical literature although they are invariably associated with theoretical inconsistencies (non-conservation of total energy, non-conservation of statistically steady state heat flow with depth, momentum and entropy equations implying inconsistent dissipations). We show that, in the infinite Prandtl number case, solving the fully compressible (FC) equations of convection with a realistic equation of state (EoS) is however not much more difficult or numerically challenging than solving the approximate cases. We compare various statistical properties of the Boussinesq, AA and FC simulations in 2-D simulations. We point to an inconsistency of the AA approximation when the two heat capacities are assumed constant. We suggest that at high Rayleigh number, the profile of dissipation in a convective mantle can be directly related to the surface heat flux. Our results are mostly discussed in the framework of mantle convection but the EoS we used is flexible enough to be applied for convection in icy planets or in the inner core

Numerical solutions of compressible convection with an infinite Prandtl number: comparison of the anelastic and anelastic liquid models with the exact equations

International audienceWe developed a numerical method for the set of equations governing fully compressible convection in the limit of infinite Prandtl numbers. Reduced models have also been analyzed, such as the anelastic approximation and the anelastic liquid approximation. The tests of our numerical schemes against self-consistent criteria have shown that our numerical simulations are consistent from the point of view of energy dissipation, heat transfer and entropy budget. The equation of state of an ideal gas has been considered in this work. Specific effects arising because of the compressibility of the fluid are studied, like the scaling of viscous dissipation and the scaling of the heat flux contribution due to the mechanical power exerted by viscous forces. We analyzed the solutions obtained with each model (full compressible model, anelastic and anelastic liquid approximations) in a wide range of dimensionless parameters and determined the errors induced by each approximation with respect to the full compressible solutions. Based on a rationale on the development of the thermal boundary layers, we can explain reasonably well the differences between the full compressible and anelastic models, in terms of both the heat transfer and viscous dissipation dependence on compressibility. This could be mostly an effect of density variations on thermal diffusivity. Based on the different forms of entropy balance between exact and anelastic models, we find that a necessary condition for convergence of the anelastic results to the exact solutions is that the product q must be small compared to unity, where is the ratio of the superadiabatic temperature difference to the adiabatic difference and q is the ratio of the superadiabatic heat flux to the heat flux conducted along the adiabat. The same condition seems to be also associated with a convergence of the computed heat fluxes. Concerning the anelastic liquid approximation, we confirm previous estimates by Anufriev et al. (2005) and find that its results become generally close to those of the full compressible model when αT D is small compared to one, where α is the isobaric thermal expansion coefficient, T the temperature (here αT = 1 for an ideal gas) and D the dissipation number