Dynamic Recrystallization in Ice: In-Situ Observation of the Strain Field during Grain Nucleation

International audienceDynamic recrystallization (DRX) occurs in minerals, metals, ice and impact on large scale mechanisms as seismic anisotropy, mechanical properties inside the Earth mantle, material forming and anisotropic flow in polar ice sheet, for instance. In this frame, ice can be considered as a model material due to a strong viscoplastic anisotropy and deformation heterogeneities, which are precursors of the recrystallization. During creep deformation at high temperature, DRX occurs from 1% strain and involves grain nucleation and grain boundary migration. As DRX induces an evolution of microstructure and texture, it strongly affects the mechanical behavior, and it is expected to modify the strain field at the grain and/or the sample scale. Creep test (σ=0.5-0.8 MPa) were performed at high temperature (T/Tf 0,98) on granular polycrystalline ice (grains size 1mm) and columnar polycrystalline ice (microstructure 2D 1/2 in plane grain size 10mm) up to 18 % strain. Columnar ice provides interesting feature as it contains only one grain through the thickness and the columns are parallel. Post-deformation texture analysis with an Automatic Ice Texture Analyzer (AITA) and with EBSD (Geoscience Montpellier) were used to investigate DRX impact on texture and microstructure, at different scales. With increasing strain texture evolves to a strong concentrated girdle with a preferential orientation of c-axis close to 35° from the compression axis. During the experiment, local strain field is measured on the surface of the sample by Digital Image Correlation (DIC) with a spatial resolution between 0.2 and 0.5 mm, and a strain resolution between 0.2% to 1%. Grain size being large, we obtain a relatively good intra-granular resolution of the strain field. Thanks to the 2D configuration of the columnar ice samples, we can superimpose the strain field measured by DIC. We will present an overview of the impact of DRX on the texture and microstructure, from the 3D configuration down to a close focus on a triple junction. In particular, we will provide original observations of strain-field evolution associated with the nucleation of new grains and subboundaries close to this triple junction. Associated with post-deformation analyses by AITA and EBSD, these observations enable to follow the strain redistribution due to the nucleation