CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Materials scientists can now use insight from a very common mineral and well-established earthquake and avalanche statistics to quantify how hostile environmental interactions may impact the degradation and failure of materials used for advanced solar panels, geological carbon sequestration and infrastructure such as buildings, roads and bridges.
The new study, led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and Bucknell University, shows that the amount of deformation caused by stress applied locally to the surface of muscovite mica is controlled by the physical condition of the mineral’s surface and follows the same statistical dynamics observed in earthquakes and avalanches.
The study findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.
When selecting materials for engineering applications, scientists want to know how the surface of that material will interact with the environment in which it will be used. Similarly, geologists want to understand how chemical reactions between minerals and groundwater along faults might slowly weaken rocks and result in quick bursts of mechanical failure due to a process called chemomechanical weakening.
“While previous attempts to quantify the effect of chemomechanical weakening in engineered materials have relied on complex molecular dynamics models requiring significant computational resources, our work instead emphasizes the bridge between laboratory experiments and real-world phenomena like earthquakes,” said graduate student Jordan Sickle, who led the study with Illinois physics professor Karin Dahmen.
“Muscovite was chosen for this study mainly because of this material’s extreme flatness,” Dahmen said. “Each of its flaky layers is flat down to the atomic level. Because of this flatness, the interaction between the surface of this material and its environment is especially important.”