Effects of microstructural heterogeneity on the macroscopic spectrum of elastically accommodated grain-boundary sliding

Abstract

Elastically accommodated grain-boundary sliding (EAGBS) is a plausible source of upper-mantle seismic attenuation and dispersion, yet classical theory predicts a localized Debye-like peak that is absent or only weakly expressed in dry olivine experiments. Here we test whether microstructural heterogeneity can explain this discrepancy using 2-D finite-element simulations on periodic Voronoi tessellations. We find that irregular grain geometry changes the baseline EAGBS response relative to the regular hexagonal benchmark, but increasing grain-size variance alone produces only modest changes in modulus and peak height, with little spectral broadening. In contrast, a broad distribution of grain-boundary viscosities progressively suppresses and broadens the Debye-like loss peak into a weak background spanning a wide frequency interval. This broadening arises from the superposition of many localized relaxation processes with distinct characteristic timescales and motivates a reduced-order 0-D description of the aggregate response. These results suggest that the absence of a pronounced EAGBS peak in dry olivine does not necessarily imply the absence of EAGBS mechanism itself. If grain boundaries sample a sufficiently broad viscosity distribution, the macroscopic EAGBS contribution may appear experimentally only as part of a broad attenuation background, while still remaining relevant for upper-mantle seismic attenuation and velocity dispersion.