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Volcanic sintering: Timescales of viscous densification and strength recovery

Vasseur, Jérémie; Wadsworth, Fabian B.; Lavallée, Yan; Hess, Kai-Uwe; Dingwell, Donald B.

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Authors

Jérémie Vasseur

Yan Lavallée

Kai-Uwe Hess

Donald B. Dingwell



Abstract

[1] Sintering and densification are ubiquitous processes influencing the emplacement of both effusive and explosive products of volcanic eruptions. Here we sinter ash‐size fragments of a synthetic National Institute of Standards and Technology viscosity standard glass at temperatures at which the resultant melt has a viscosity of ∼108–109 Pa.s at 1bar to assess sintering dynamics under near‐surface volcanic conditions. We track the strength recovery via uniaxial compressive tests. We observe that volcanic ash sintering is dominantly time dependent, temperature dependent, and grain size dependent and may thus be interpreted to be controlled by melt viscosity and surface tension. Sintering evolves from particle agglutination to viscous pore collapse and is accompanied by a reduction in connected porosity and an increase in isolated pores. Sintering and densification result in a nonlinear increase in strength. Micromechanical modeling shows that the pore‐emanated crack model explains the strength of porous lava as a function of pore fraction and size.

Citation

Vasseur, J., Wadsworth, F. B., Lavallée, Y., Hess, K., & Dingwell, D. B. (2013). Volcanic sintering: Timescales of viscous densification and strength recovery. Geophysical Research Letters, 40(21), 5658-5664. https://doi.org/10.1002/2013gl058105

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 22, 2013
Online Publication Date Nov 15, 2013
Publication Date Nov 16, 2013
Deposit Date Mar 20, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Geophysical Research Letters
Print ISSN 0094-8276
Electronic ISSN 1944-8007
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 40
Issue 21
Pages 5658-5664
DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/2013gl058105

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2013 The Authors. Geophysical Research Letters published by Wiley on behalf of the American Geophysical Union This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.





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