Fundamental Physics of Frictional Fluids
Upcoming talk at AGU '23! My main research project explores the flow-to-fracture transition, as seen in Hele-Shaw cell experiments with frictional fluids. There is evidence that this macro-level behavior, which describes the fluidization of landslides and flow of gassy magma, is dictated by micro-level processes at the grain scale. We are directly numerically simulating multiphase interactions between grain, host fluid, and gas, and we focus our work on the impact of the viscosity of the host fluid to see how this behavior is exhibited in a variety of natural systems. To track the interface between the gas and the saturated granular medium, we use a level-set method.