Check out the talk by Ioannis Stefanou and Filippo Masi at the Data-Centric Engineering Institute of the University of Sydney

Earthquakes nucleate when large amounts of elastic energy are suddenly released due to abrupt sliding over seismic faults. Besides physical causes, this energy release can be also triggered by injecting large amounts of fluids in the earth’s crust. Indeed, recent events show that injections can reactivate existing seismogenic faults and induce/trigger important earthquakes.

However, one can see the problem of fluid injections from another perspective. The dependence of fault friction on fluid pressure can be used as an input for stabilizing it. New results based on the mathematical theory of control show that it is indeed possible to stabilize and restrict chaos in this kind of non-linear unstable frictional systems and assure slow frictional dissipation toward desirable global asymptotic equilibria of lower potential energy.

Our mathematical derivations show that earthquake robust control is possible, provided that fault friction is bounded. Friction is a complex phenomenon involving several spatio-temporal scales and complex dynamics. In spite of complexity, the finiteness of energy of any physical process influencing friction as well as existing laboratory and in-situ experiments, support the boundedness of friction. However, the quantification of these bounds is challenging as experiments are difficult to perform deep down in the earth. As a result, we have to rely also on numerical simulations and digital twins of seismic faults, which until know are computationally very demanding.

To this end, we develop a novel deep learning approach for modeling complex materials, by enforcing the laws of thermodynamics. The method is accurate, fast and scalable, and will allow, in the near future, to derive reliable quantitative estimations of the bounds of fault friction under the effect of multiphyics couplings and complex grain/particle dynamics. In parallel, it will enable to optimize our earthquake control strategies by performing large scale simulations of real fault systems in a virtual, data- and physics-driven environment, that fits on a laptop.

Presentation slides are available here