Fluid- driven fault nucleation, rupture processes, and permeability evolution in oshima granite — Preliminary results and acoustic emission datasets

Abstract

This study investigated the fault nucleation and rupture processes driven by stress and fluid pressure in fine-grained granite by monitoring acoustic emissions (AEs). Through detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal distribution of the AE hypocenter, P-wave velocity, stress-strain, and other experimental observation data under different confining pressures for stress-driven fractures and under different water injection conditions for fluid-driven fractures, it was found that fluid has the following effects: 1) complicating the fault nucleation process, 2) exhibiting episodic AE activity corresponding to fault branching and the formation of multiple faults, 3) extending the spatiotemporal scale of nucleation processes and pre-slip, and 4) reducing the dynamic rupture velocity and stress drop. The experiments also show that 1) during the fault nucleation process, the b- value for AEs changes from 1 to 1.3 to 0.5 before dynamic rupture, and then rapidly recovers to around 1-1.2 during aftershock activity and 2) the hydraulic diffusivity gradually increases from an initial pre-rupture order of 0.1 m²/s to 10-100 m²/ s after dynamic rupture. These results provide a reasonable fault pre-slip model, indicating that hydraulic fracturing promotes shear slip before dynamic rupture, as well as laboratory-scale insights into ensuring the safety and effectiveness of hydraulic fracturing operations related to activities such as geothermal development, evaluating the seismic risk induced by water injection, and further researching the precursory preparation process for deep fluid-driven or fluid-involved natural earthquakes. The publicly available dataset is expected to be used for various purposes, including 1) as training data for artificial intelligence related to microseismic data processing and analysis, 2) predicting the remaining time before rock fractures, and 3) establishing models and assessment methods for the relationship between microseismic characteristics and rock hydraulic properties, which will deepen our understanding of the interaction mechanisms between fluid migration and rock deformation and fracture.

Keywords

Rock fracture experiment / Injection-induced seismicity / Faulting nucleation / Fluid diffusion / Pre-slip / Dilatancy-hardening

Declaration of competitive interest

The authors declare that they have no known competitive interests or personal relationships that may affect the work reported in this article.

Acknowledgements

I express our gratitude for Dr. Xiaoying Li from the Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for her contributions through the preparation of and experimentation on some of the samples. I would like to express gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ghm.2024.04.003.

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