Soft matter physics of the ground beneath our feet

The soft part of the Earth's surface – the ground beneath our feet – constitutes the basis for life and natural resources, yet a general physical understanding of the ground is still lacking. In this critical time of climate change, cross-pollination of scientific approaches is urgently needed to better understand the behavior of our planet's surface. The major topics in current research in this area cross different disciplines, spanning geosciences, and various aspects of engineering, material sciences, physics, chemistry, and biology. Among these, soft matter physics has emerged as a fundamental nexus connecting and underpinning many research questions. This perspective article is a multi-voice effort to bring together different views and approaches, questions and insights, from researchers that work in this emerging area, the soft matter physics of the ground beneath our feet. In particular, we identify four major challenges concerned with the dynamics in and of the ground: (I) modeling from the grain scale, (II) near-criticality, (III) bridging scales, and (IV) life. For each challenge, we present a selection of topics by individual authors, providing specific context, recent advances, and open questions. Through this, we seek to provide an overview of the opportunities for the broad Soft Matter community to contribute to the fundamental understanding of the physics of the ground, strive towards a common language, and encourage new collaborations across the broad spectrum of scientists interested in the matter of the Earth's surface

Shear-enhanced convection in a mushy layer

We investigate the effect of an external shear flow on the buoyant instabilities inherent in the directional solidification of a dendritic mushy layer. In the presence of an external shear flow, perturbations of the mush-liquid interface lead to perturbed flow in the bulk fluid that create pressure variations along the mush-liquid interface. These pressure variations drive flow in the mushy layer. A numerical analysis of the stability of the system provides the critical porous-medium Rayleigh number as a function of both the external flow speed and the wavenumber of the interfacial perturbations. In the limit of zero external flow we recover the so-called boundary and mushy layer modes of buoyancy-driven convection first established by Worster (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 237, 1992 b, p. 649). We find that the application of an external flow can significantly reduce the stability of both the boundary and mushy layer modes. The resultant forced mushy layer mode gives rise to the formation of channels of reduced solid fraction perpendicular to the applied flow that are distinct from the planform found in the absence of an external flow. The stability of the system is examined as a function of the principal thermodynamic and dynamic parameters, and the results are applied to the solidification of sea ice in the presence of vigorous oceanic flow. © 2008 Cambridge University Press

Shear flow, phase change and matched asymptotic expansions: Pattern formation in mushy layers

In many scientific and engineering problems the solidification of an alloy leads to a highly convoluted crystalline matrix modeled as a thermodynamically controlled reactive porous medium called a mushy layer. We analyze the interaction of an external shear flow with a solidifying mushy layer through a corrugated mushliquid interface. We find that the external flow can drive forced convective motions within the mushy layer resulting in the formation of a pattern of dissolution and solidification features transverse to the overall flow. Here we seek to lay bare the underlying processes through a systematic comparison of matched asymptotic expansions and numerical solutions. The success of our modeling effort draws substantially upon understanding gleaned from the fluid mechanics of boundary layers and the theory of multi-component solidification. The results have a broad range of implications in geophysics and materials science. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Fluid-driven deformation of a soft granular material

Compressing a porous, fluid-filled material drives the interstitial fluid out of the pore space, as when squeezing water out of a kitchen sponge. Inversely, injecting fluid into a porous material can deform the solid structure, as when fracturing a shale for natural gas recovery. These poromechanical interactions play an important role in geological and biological systems across a wide range of scales, from the propagation of magma through Earth’s mantle to the transport of fluid through living cells and tissues. The theory of poroelasticity has been largely successful in modeling poromechanical behavior in relatively simple systems, but this continuum theory is fundamentally limited by our understanding of the pore-scale interactions between the fluid and the solid, and these problems are notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting. Here, we present a high-resolution measurement of injection-driven poromechanical deformation in a system with granular microsctructure: We inject fluid into a dense, confined monolayer of soft particles and use particle tracking to reveal the dynamics of the multiscale deformation field. We find that a continuum model based on poroelasticity theory captures certain macroscopic features of the deformation, but the particle-scale deformation field exhibits dramatic departures from smooth, continuum behavior. We observe particle-scale rearrangement and hysteresis, as well as petal-like mesoscale structures that are connected to material failure through spiral shear banding. </p

Optimal and hysteretic fluxes in alloy solidification: Variational principles and chimney spacing

We take a numerical approach to analyze the mechanisms controlling the spacing of chimneys -- channels devoid of solid -- in two-dimensional mushy layers formed by solidifying a binary alloy. Chimneys are the principal conduits through which buoyancy effects transport material out of the mushy layer and into the liquid from which it formed. Experiments show a coarsening of chimney spacing and we pursue the hypothesis that this observation is a consequence of a variational principle: the chimney spacing adjusts to optimize material transport and hence maximize the rate of removal of potential energy stored in the mushy layer. The optimal solute flux increases approximately linearly with the mushy layer Rayleigh number. However, for spacings below a critical value the chimneys collapse and solute fluxes cease, revealing a hysteresis between chimney convection and no flow. </p