On the thermal budget of Pahoehoe lava flows

In this thesis I investigate some aspects of the thermal budget of pahoehoe lava flows. This is done with a combination of general field observations, quantitative modeling, and specific field experiments. The results of this work apply to pahoehoe flows in general, even though the vast bulk of the work has been conducted on the lavas formed by the Pu'u 'O'o - Kupaianaha eruption of Kilauea Volcano on Hawai'i. The field observations rely heavily on discussions with the staff of the United States Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), under whom I labored repeatedly in 1991-1993 for a period totaling about 10 months.

The quantitative models I have constructed are based on the physical processes observed by others and myself to be active on pahoehoe lava flows. By building up these models from the basic physical principles involved, this work avoids many of the pitfalls of earlier attempts to fit field observations with "intuitively appropriate" mathematical expressions. Unlike many earlier works, my model results can be analyzed in terms of the interactions between the different physical processes. I constructed models to: (1) describe the initial cooling of small pahoehoe flow lobes and (2) understand the thermal budget of lava tubes.

The field experiments were designed either to validate model results or to constrain key input parameters. In support of the cooling model for pahoehoe flow lobes, attempts were made to measure: (1) the cooling within the flow lobes, (2) the amount of heat transported away from the lava by wind, and (3) the growth of the crust on the lobes. Field data collected by Jones [1992], Hon et al. [1994b], and Denlinger [Keszthelyi and Denlinger, in prep.] were also particularly useful in constraining my cooling model for flow lobes. Most of the field observations I have used to constrain the thermal budget of lava tubes were collected by HVO (geological and geophysical monitoring) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (airborne infrared imagery [Realmuto et al., 1992]). I was able to assist HVO for part of their lava tube monitoring program and also to collect helicopterborne and ground-based IR video in collaboration with JPL [Keszthelyi et al., 1993].

The most significant results of this work are (1) the quantitative demonstration that the emplacement of pahoehoe and 'a'a flows are the fundamentally different, (2) confirmation that even the longest lava flows observed in our Solar System could have formed as low effusion rate, tube-fed pahoehoe flows, and (3) the recognition that the atmosphere plays a very important role throughout the cooling of history of pahoehoe lava flows. In addition to answering specific questions about the thermal budget of tube-fed pahoehoe lava flows, this thesis has led to some additional, more general, insights into the emplacement of these lava flows. This general understanding of the tube-fed pahoehoe lava flow as a system has suggested foci for future research in this part of physical volcanology.

Thin metastructures with engineered thermal expansion

The geometry and constituent materials of metastructures can be used to engineer the thermal expansion coefficient. In this thesis, we design, fabricate, and test thin thermally stable metastructures consisting of bi-metallic unit cells and show how the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of these metastructures can be finely and coarsely tuned by varying the CTE of the constituent materials and the unit cell geometry. Planar and three-dimensional finite element method modeling is used to drive the design and inform experiments, and predict the response of these metastructures. We demonstrate computationally the significance of out-of-plane effects in the metastructure response. We develop an experimental setup using digital image correlation and an infrared camera to experimentally measure full displacement and temperature fields during testing and accurately measure the metastructures’ CTE. We experimentally demonstrate high aspect ratio metastructures of Ti/Al and Kovar/Al which exhibit near-zero and negative CTE, respectively. We demonstrate robust fabrication procedures for thermally stable samples with high aspect ratios in thin foil and thin film scales. We investigate the lattice structure and mechanical properties of thin films comprising a near-zero CTE metastructure. The mechanics developed in this work can be used to engineer metastructures of arbitrary CTE and can be extended to three dimensions.

High fidelity probe and mitigation of mirror thermal fluctuations

Thermal noise arising from mechanical loss in high reflective dielectric coatings is a significant source of noise in precision optical measurements. In particular, Advanced LIGO, a large scale interferometer aiming to observed gravitational wave, is expected to be limited by coating thermal noise in the most sensitive region around 30–300 Hz. Various theoretical calculations for predicting coating Brownian noise have been proposed. However, due to the relatively limited knowledge of the coating material properties, an accurate approximation of the noise cannot be achieved. A testbed that can directly observed coating thermal noise close to Advanced LIGO band will serve as an indispensable tool to verify the calculations, study material properties of the coating, and estimate the detector’s performance.

This dissertation reports a setup that has sensitivity to observe wide band (10Hz to 1kHz) thermal noise from fused silica/tantala coating at room temperature from fixed-spacer Fabry–Perot cavities. Important fundamental noises and technical noises associated with the setup are discussed. The coating loss obtained from the measurement agrees with results reported in the literature. The setup serves as a testbed to study thermal noise in high reflective mirrors from different materials. One example is a heterostructure of Al_xGa_1−xAs (AlGaAs). An optimized design to minimize thermo–optic noise in the coating is proposed and discussed in this work.

A. An investigation of the relation between the tensile strength and (Brinell) hardness of non-ferrous alloys. B. A design of a fatigue testing machine for a college laboratory

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Theory of viscous and thermal attenuation of sound by small spheres

The problem is to calculate the attenuation of plane sound waves passing through a viscous, heat-conducting fluid containing small spherical inhomogeneities. The attenuation is calculated by evaluating the rate of increase of entropy caused by two irreversible processes: (1) the mechanical work done by the viscous stresses in the presence of velocity gradients, and (2) the flow of heat down the thermal gradients. The method is first applied to a homogeneous fluid with no spheres and shown to give the classical Stokes-Kirchhoff expressions. The method is then used to calculate the additional viscous and thermal attenuation when small spheres are present. The viscous attenuation agrees with Epstein's result obtained in 1941 for a non-heat-conducting fluid. The thermal attenuation is found to be similar in form to the viscous attenuation and, for gases, of comparable magnitude. The general results are applied to the case of water drops in air and air bubbles in water.

For water drops in air the viscous and thermal attenuations are camparable; the thermal losses occur almost entirely in the air, the thermal dissipation in the water being negligible. The theoretical values are compared with Knudsen's experimental data for fogs and found to agree in order of magnitude and dependence on frequency. For air bubbles in water the viscous losses are negligible and the calculated attenuation is almost completely due to thermal losses occurring in the air inside the bubbles, the thermal dissipation in the water being relatively small. (These results apply only to non-resonant bubbles whose radius changes but slightly during the acoustic cycle.)