Meet Armando

Armando Domingos worked on his senior thesis this year in the rock and ice mechanics lab.

In addition to helping me immensely with making ice samples for frictional testing, he also made his own "exotic ice" samples by mixing in small amounts of ammonia. Ammonia is considered a possible second phase on Enceladus and is particularly interesting because of its deep eutectic with ice.

In particular he was looking at the equilibrium microstructure of the ice+ammonia system above the solidus, so where the ammonia was in a melt phase. Based on the relative surface energies, a partial melt system will have melt located at triple junctions in the ice in either trapped convex blebs, concave pockets, or completely wetted grain faces. The measure of the wetting angle is called the "dihedral angle".

Armando made dozens of samples and measured several hundred angles and wrote it all up in his senior thesis. He is now heading off to grad school at U.C. Berkeley. Best of luck, Armando!