Thermo-elastic aspects of dynamic nucleation

In spite of recent progress in our understanding of the absolute stability of elastic phases under loads, the generic presence of metastable configurations and the possibility of their dynamic breakdown remains a major problem in the mechanical theory of phase transitions in solids. In this paper, by considering the simplest one-dimensional model, we study the interplay between inertial and thermal effects associated with nucleation of a new phase, and address the crucial question concerning the size of a perturbation breaking metastability. We begin by reformulating the nucleation problem as a degenerate Riemann problem. By choosing a specific kinetic relation, originating from thermo-visco-capillary (TVC) regularization, we solve a self-similar problem analytically and demonstrate the existence of two types of solutions: with nucleation and without it. We then show that in the presence of a non-zero latent heat, solution with nucleation may by itself be non-unique. To understand the domain of attraction of different self-similar solutions with and without nucleation, we regularize the model and study numerically the full scale initial value problem with locally perturbed data. Through numerical experiments we present evidence that the TVC regularization is successful in removing deficiencies of the classical thermo-elastic model and is sufficient in specifying the limits of metastability.