Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

Browse

Filters

20091

Settings

Author: search.filters.author.Miller, Noah AndrewSubject: search.filters.subject.Geophysics

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Melting and Phase Relations in Iron-Silicon Alloys with Applications to the Earth's Core
    (2009) Miller, Noah Andrew; Campbell, Andrew; Geology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Experiments were performed on iron-silicon alloys to determine their suitability as analog compositions for the Earth's core. Starting compositions with 9 wt.% silicon and 16 wt.% silicon were compressed in diamond anvil cells and laser-heated. The melting temperatures of the alloys were measured up to 52 GPa using a recently developed optical system. Both curves show a melting point depression from pure iron but intersect at ~50 GPa. The two starting compositions were also studied up to 90 GPa and over 3500 K in synchrotron x-ray diffraction experiments, and phase diagrams were constructed for both compositions that show significant deviation from the pure iron phase diagram. Based on this synchrotron data, a model was produced which predicts the core to contain 8.6 to 11.1 wt.% silicon for a core-mantle boundary temperature of 4000 K.