The Fatigue of Water Ice: Insight into the Tectonic Resurfacing of Tidally Deformed Icy Satellites

Abstract:

Fatigue is a process that causes materials to weaken during cyclic loading and experience brittle failure at much lower applied stresses. We perform laboratory experiments to study the fatigue behavior of water ice at conditions relevant to the surfaces of icy satellites, to test the hypothesis that the lithospheres of some icy satellites are weakened by fatigue.

Many icy moons of the outer solar system, such as Europa and Enceladus, experience cyclic stresses driven by tidal forces from their parent planet. Stresses generated by tides and other physical processes, such as solid-state convection of the ice shell, are weak compared to laboratory derived yield stress values of ice. The surface geology on many icy moons, however, suggests that these processes are capable of deforming the surface, suggesting that their surfaces may have been weakened.

During fatigue, microcracks slowly grow under the action of cyclic loads. Cracks grow until the stress intensity reaches a critical value and the sample fractures. The rate of microcrack growth varies with material, temperature, and loading frequency, but under most conditions the growth rate can be characterized by Paris’ Law. We use a servo-hydraulic loading machine to perform cyclic 4-point bending tests on polycrystalline ice samples to measure the rate of fatigue crack growth. Ice samples are formed using the standard ice method in a sample mold with dimensions of 10x4x2 cm with an average grain size of 1.2 mm. An initial flaw is cut into the sample and loaded such that the flaw experiences the maximum tensile stress in the sample. Our initial experiments were performed at T=223 K, loading frequencies of 0.5 Hz, and stress intensities ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 of the plane-strain fracture toughness. Sample compliance is used to estimate crack length according to analytical solutions [1]. Experiments show an increase in compliance with time, consistent with substantial subcritical crack growth. Future experiments will allow us to determine how subcritical crack growth rates vary as a function of stress intensity, temperature and frequency. We will use our data to extrapolate to conditions present in the near-surface of icy satellites to determine the effect of fatigue on icy satellite resurfacing. 

[1] Hubner H. and Jillik J., (1977) J. Material Sci. 12.