Publications Details

Triaxial Shear Tests on Simulated Sierra White Fault Gouge & Borehole Simulation in Sierra White Gouge

Choens II, Robert C.; Yoon, Hongkyu

Laboratory shear tests were conducted on pulverized Sierra White granite (SWG) to investigate slip mechanisms in naturally occurring faults. Synthetic fault geometries were constructed by sandwiching fine grained SWG powder in between steel forcing blocks. For dry experiments, ~3.5 g of SWG powder was poured onto the face of the lower steel forcing block and leveled. For saturated experiments, enough fluid was added to the ~3.5 g of Sierra White granite powder to form a slurry. This slurry was applied to the lower forcing block and leveled. Inclined forcing blocks with 25.4 mm diameter and 35° faces, which were machined from ground steel rods with fine teeth on the faces, help to hold the gouge in place and prevent delamination at the interface. The top forcing block had a 2.03 mm centered hole to allow pore fluid access to the gouge. A fine steel mesh prevented back flow of the gouge into pore fluid lines. Samples were isolated from the confining medium using three layers of heat shrink polyolefin, as shown in Figure 1. The outer layer was shrunk over the o-rings on the end caps to form an impermeable seal, which was reinforced with steel tie wires on both sides of the o-rings. Hardened steel spacers and copper shim stock was placed between the steel forcing blocks and the end caps to preserve the parallelism of the Hastelloy wetted parts. For dry samples, the end caps were plugged, while the end caps for the saturated samples were connected to pore lines.