I am in the early stages of doing some research with some undergraduate students who have expressed interested in doing modeling of cryvolcanics processes. I have been familiar with your software (i attended a parallel boot camp 2 years ago), but have not used it before. After having read the manual, it seems like volcanic molding is possible using pylith, even if it is not the primary function of the software. I know that I will need to add the visco parameters for the rheology, but do you think that something like this is even possible with your software?
People do use PyLith to model magma reservoir inflation. If you provide more details about what physical processes you want to model, we should be able to provide a more definitive answer.
At a first order approximation that is basically what are interested in doing. I am curious about the conditions in which it is possible to get either full migration of melt fluid (water) to the surface or the deformation caused at the surface if the fluid gets close. The lithospheres of these icy bodies are fairly small, some have high thermal gradients (Encelaldus). In a neutral buoyancy environment the fluid will not get to the surface, so I am going to need to force it in some mechanism either a moving side boundary or bottom boundary. If I can initiate a maxwell viscoelastic rheology using ice, then the ice at the baes of these ice shells are basically strengthless, so it should place a limit on where a magma chamber could be.
PyLith solves the elasticity equation and has a small strain formulation, so it can compute deformation with updated geometry but not transport. PyLith includes linear and generalized Maxwell viscoelastic rheologies and time dependent Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. Magma reservoir inflation is usually modeled with a predefined hollow cavity to which an outward pressure is applied and the simulation is used to compute the resulting deformation. In other words, the magma is not included in the model, only its effects are.