Analysis of Instabilities in Faults
In this chapter, the authors are interested in modeling the creation of shear bands within a fault zone by taking into account the influence of the characteristic size of the microstructure through Cosserat continuum theory together with thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) couplings. Two approaches are considered to study the system of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations: linear stability analysis (LSA) and the finite element method. The LSA allows us to examine the conditions of the occurrence of instabilities (loss of homogeneity for the field of deformation) for a mechanical system with multiphysical couplings. A LSA enables us to determine the conditions under which the localization is triggered. Strain localization is a phenomenon that can be modeled as a bifurcation.
