Advanced acoustic emission analysis of brittle and porous rock fracturing

S. Stanchits^1a and G. Dresen¹

¹ GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Telegrafenberg D423, 14473 Potsdam, Germany

^a e-mail : stanch@gfz-potsdam.de

Published online: 10 June 2010

Abstract

Analysis of Acoustic Emission (AE) induced during brittle and porous rock fracturing at variety of loading conditions has been performed. On the base of advanced analysis of AE parameters, ultrasonic velocities and mechanical data we found that regardless of applied loading conditions the process of rock fracture can be separated into two main stages: (A) accumulation of non-correlated cracks localized almost randomly in the whole volume of uniformly stressed rock. (B) Final stage of sample fracturing could be characterized by appearance of AE nucleation site followed by initiation and propagation of the macroscopic fault. Contribution of tensile sources is reduced significantly, shear type and pore collapse type events dominate during propagation of a fracture process zone through the sample regardless of applied loading conditions. In the case of porous rock, nucleation of compaction bands could be clearly identified by the appearance of AE clusters inside the samples. Microstructural analysis of fractured samples shows excellent agreement between location of AE hypocenters and faults or the positions of compaction bands, confirming that advanced AE analysis is a powerful tool for the process of rock fracture investigation.