Thermodynamically consistent variational theory of porous media with a breaking component

If a porous media is being damaged by excessive stress, the elastic matrix at every infinitesimal volume separates into a ‘solid’ and a ‘broken’ component. The ‘solid’ part is the one that is capable of transferring stress, whereas the ‘broken’ part is advecting passively and is not able to transfer the stress. In previous works, damage mechanics was addressed by introducing the damage parameter affecting the elastic properties of the material. In this work, we take a more microscopic point of view, by considering the transition from the ‘solid’ part, which can transfer mechanical stress, to the ‘broken’ part, which consists of microscopic solid particles and does not transfer mechanical stress. Based on this approach, we develop a thermodynamically consistent dynamical theory for porous media including the transfer between the ‘broken’ and ‘solid’ components, by using a variational principle recently proposed in thermodynamics. This setting allows us to derive an explicit formula for the breaking rate, i.e., the transition from the ‘solid’ to the ‘broken’ phase, dependent on the Gibbs’ free energy of each phase. Using that expression, we derive a reduced variational model for material breaking under one-dimensional deformations. We show that the material is destroyed in finite time, and that the number of ‘solid’ strands vanishing at the singularity follows a power law. We also discuss connections with existing experiments on material breaking and extensions to multi-phase porous media.