PhD position in Grenoble, France, on phase field sea ice modelling
Sea ice, is a very complex material that exhibits different mechanical behaviors depending on its local state. Indeed, when and where it is dense (like in winter and in the central Arctic), it behaves as a continuous and breakable solid. Where it is broken and loosened, it behaves like a frictional granular media. Between these two different regimes - solid and granular - the intensity of energy, gas, and momentum exchanges between the ice, the atmosphere and the ocean are widely different, hence the importance of capturing their essence in the continuum models that are used for climate predictions. Equally important is the capability to simulate the transition between these regimes, or granularization of the sea ice cover, as it strongly controls both its local/seasonal and large-scale/long-term evolution.
This Ph.D. project aims at developing a model able to capture this granularization transition, by representing the propagation of a fragmented (i.e., damaged) phase into a continuous solid using the phase field approach.
Regarding this approach, the project will tackle several fundamental challenges that stem from the context of sea ice and similarly behaving geophysical objects, for instance: coupling the phase field to a visco-elastic constitutive equation to allow irreversible deformations in the damaged phase as well as formulating theoretically and numerically a critical energy criterion for shear-compressive failure.
In the context of SASIP and the WP2, the model developed will be used to investigate the evolution of the macroscopic mechanical resistance of sea ice across the granularization transition and thereby inform large-scale constitutive equations and parameterizations of this transition.
The Ph.D. project will be based in Grenoble. It will be supervised by Véronique Dansereau (Université Grenoble Alpes, ISTerre and IGE) and Luiza Angheluta-Bauer (University of Oslo).
More information and the application link can be found here
Deadline: February 22, 2024
Start date: October, 1 2024
