Modeling the priming mechanism of phreatic eruptions
Manuel Stocchi 1,2, Guillaume Houzeaux2, Antonio Costa3, Arnau Folch4, Silvia Massaro3, Roberto Sulpizio1
Affiliations: 1: Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e Geoambientali, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy; 2: Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE), Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain 3: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Bologna, Italy 4: Geociencias Barcelona (GEO3BCN-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain
Presentation type: Poster
Presentation time: Thursday 16:30 - 18:30, Room Poster Hall
Poster Board Number: 80
Programme No: 3.14.14
Abstract
Phreatic and hydrothermal eruptions are "wet" eruptions in which fluids (mostly water) hosted in reservoirs at relatively shallow depth explode due to the injection of energy from a deeper source, i.e. geothermal heat for hydrothermal eruptions or hot fluid of magmatic origin for phreatic eruptions. This energy increases the temperature of the water contained within the reservoir up to a state in which a sudden pressure drop might result in explosive expansion. Here we propose a physical model of these systems. This model has been developed applying the mixture theory to the Navier-Stokes system of equation, resulting in a system capable of describing the mechanic and thermodynamic evolution of a biphasic (liquid+gas) fluid within a porous medium. A numerical solver for this model has been implemented in a module for the finite element solver Alya (developed in Barcelona Supercomputing Center). The aim of this research is to constrain in a quantitative way the conditions that are necessary for these eruptions to occur, possibly providing a tool for understanding the hazard related to these phenomena