Nationality: Brazilian
Creep host institution: Géosciences Montpellier, France
Background: I am a geologist graduated at the Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. During the graduation my research work was focused on the chemostratigraphy of carbonate sequences and on (field) structural analyses of upper/middle crust deformation. A scholarship of the Brazilian government allowed me also to graduate in Geology at the University of Derby, England, where I worked on major-elements geochemistry of mantle melt-inclusions. In a summer internship at the Université de Montpellier, I also had the opportunity to study olivine deformation and melt percolation in mantle xenoliths.
Research Interests: I am becoming increasingly curious by the evolution of the lithospheric mantle and how the strain is localized. I am interested in the feedbacks between structure, texture and composition to create physical anisotropies, heterogeneities and rheological contrast.
CREEP project: In my PhD, I will investigate the implications of deformation-induced mechanical anisotropy in the lithospheric mantle to form new plate boundaries. To do so we will develop new routines to predict the evolution of olivine crystal preferred orientation (CPO) in the upper mantle and the resulting anisotropy in mechanical properties. The mechanical behaviour of the mantle as a function of the Olivine CPO will be studied using a multi-scale approach where the crystal-scale behavior will be described by parameterized equations, which will be implemented in a finite-element (FE) code to modelling plate-scale deformation. This code will then be used to evaluate the relation between viscous anisotropy in the lithospheric mantle and strain localization leading to formation of subduction zones, rifts and large-scale ductile shear zones.
We expect a better understanding of strain localization in the ductile regime in geomaterials and alloys, and also parameterized description of deformation-induced mechanical anisotropy that can be incorporated into 3-D geodynamical and material science codes.
This CREEP project is done in cooperation with the company Aperam Steel, where I will be working on modelling mechanical properties and microstructural evolution of steel.
Supervisors: Andréa Tommasi1, Javier Signorelli2 , Paul Tackley3
1Geosciences Montpellier, Université de Montpellier, France
2CONICET, Instituto de Física Rosario, Argentina
3Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
