STEPHEN SCHNEIDER
The driving force behind this project was to determine how grain boundary wetness is affected when a sample of synthetic peridotite is deformed. Grain boundary wetness is defined as the ratio of solid-liquid boundary area divided by the total area of interphase boundaries in a sample.
Experimentation was performed with approximate melt fractions of 0.03, 0.07, and 0.15 with a deformed and an undeformed sample of each. We wanted to determine the effect of deformation to these samples by acquiring and digitally analyzing SEM images for each. With the application of Adobe Photoshop, the images were edited to make each one a binary matrix of 0's and 1's. The image was then processed in Matlab so that the area of the solid-liquid and solid-solid boundaries could be measured. Finally the wetness data was compared to the melt fraction of each SEM image and put in graphical form. Based on the results we see that deformation has no real discernible effect on grain boundary wetness at such low stress of < 50Mpa.