Contact Phase-Field Modeling for Chemo-Mechanical Degradation Processes. Part II: Numerical Applications with Focus on Pressure Solution

The microstructural geometry (MG) of materials has a significant influence on their macroscopic response, all the more when the process is essentially microscopic as for microstructural degradation processes. However, the MG tends to be approximated by ideal spherical packings with constitutive description of the microstructural contacts. Interfaces tracking models like phase-field modeling (PFM) are promising candidates to capture the microstructures dynamics. Contact PFM (CPFM) enables to include catalyzing/inhibiting (CI) effects, accelerating/delaying equilibrium, such as temperature or the presence of certain constituents. To emphasize the influence of geometry and CI effects, we study numerically the chemo-mechanical response of digitalized geomaterials at the grain scale. An application to pressure solution creep (PSC) shows the importance of the MG and how the influence of temperature and clay can be taken into account without explicit modeling. As already inferred in previous works on PSC, the lack of MG considerations could be the reason why a unique description of PSC is missing. A simple reason could be that PSC is directly dependent on the strain concentration, which is directly dependent on the MG. This is our motivation here to investigate and suggest the influence of the MG on a degradation process like PSC.