Thermal evolution and sintering of chondritic planetesimals – II. Improved treatment of the compaction process

Hans-Peter Gail, Stephan Henke and Mario Trieloff

Astronomy & Astrophysics
Volume 576, April 2015
published online: 27 March 2015
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201424278

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Results. By comparison with some published data on sintering experiments it is shown that the algorithm to follow the decrease of porosity of granular material during progressive sintering allows a sufficiently accurate modelling of the compaction of silicate material. The dependence of the compaction process on the nature of the precursor material, either matrix-dominated or chondrule-dominated, is discussed. It is shown that the characteristic temperature at which sintering occurs is different for matrix or chondrule-dominated precursor material. We apply the new method for calculating compaction to the evolution of the parent body of the H chondrites and determine an improved optimised set of model parameters for this body.