Hi Judy,
Sorry for the slow reply (and I guess this also answers my question from the other thread; you do need magma transport for your problem). For what you’re trying to do, I think you need to pick a material model that is closest to what you want to do and then modify it yourself. For example, if you wanted to have a channel that makes it easy for melt to flow though, you could add a compositional field to one of the melt material models and give that a higher permeability, making it easier for melt to flow though a specific place.
The porosity is simply the volume fraction of melt at a given location, so if, for example, your temperature was below the solidus then all your melt would start to crystallize.
But studying melt migration in the setting of a plume interacting with the overlying lithosphere that has a visco-elasto-plastic rheology is a challenging problem; you would expect interactions between the melt and the fractures in the lithosphere, for example, and this is something that we haven’t implemented in ASPECT yet. So can you be a bit more specific about what features you would actually need for your problem, and then we can see what’s currently in ASPECT and what you would have to add and who to talk to. It could also be good to come to one of the ASPECT user meetings on Wednesday.
Best wishes,
Juliane