Molecular origin of sliding friction and flash heating in rock and heterogeneous materials

It is generally believed that earthquakes occur when faults weaken with increasing slip rates. An important factor contributing to this phenomenon is the faults’ dynamic friction, which may be reduced during earthquakes with high slip rates, a process known as slip-rate weakening. It has been hypothesized that the weakening phenomenon during fault slip may be activated by thermal pressurization of pores’ fluid and flash heating, a microscopic phenomenon in which heat is generated at asperity contacts due to high shear slip rates. Due to low thermal conductivity of rock, the heat generated at the contact points or surfaces cannot diffuse fast enough, thus concentrating at the contacts, increasing the local contact temperature, and reducing its frictional shear strength. We report the results of what we believe to be the first molecular scale study of the decay of the interfacial friction force in rock, observed in experiemntal studies and attributed to flash heating. The magnitude of the reduction in the shear stress and the local friction coefficients have been computed over a wide range of shear velocities V. The molecular simulations indicate that as the interfacial temperature increases, bonds between the atoms begin to break, giving rise to molecular-scale fracture that eventually produces the flash heating effect. The frequency of flash heating events increases with increasing sliding velocity, leaving increasingly shorter times for the material to relax, hence contributing to the increased interfacial temperature. If the material is thin, the heat quickly diffuses away from the interface, resulting in sharp decrease in the temperature immediately after flash heating. The rate of heat transfer is reduced significantly with increasing thickness, keeping most of the heat close to the interface and producing weakened material. The weakening behavior is demonstrated by computing the stress–strain diagram. For small strain rates there the frictional stress is essentially independent of the materials’ thickness. As the strain rate increases, however, the dependence becomes stronger. Specifically, the stress–strain diagrams at lower velocities V manifest a pronounced strength decrease over small distances, whereas they exhibit progressive increase in the shear stress at higher V, which is reminiscent of a transition from ductile behavior at high velocities to brittle response at low velocities.