High-velocity frictional behavior of Longmenshan fault gouge from Hongkou outcrop and its implications for dynamic weakening of fault during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake

High-velocity friction experiments were conducted on clayey fault gouge collected from Hongkou outcrop of Beichuan fault, located at the southwestern part of Longmenshan fault system that caused the disastrous 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. The ultimate purpose of this study is to reproduce this earthquake by modeling based on measured frictional properties. Dry gouge of about 1 mm in thickness was deformed dry at slip rates of 0.01 to 1.3 m/s and at normal stresses of 0.61 to 3.04 MPa, using a rotary-shear high-velocity frictional testing machine. The gouge displays slip weakening behavior as initial peak friction decays towards steady-state values after a given displacement. Both peak friction and steady-state friction remain high at slow slip rates are exam- ined and gouge only exhibits dramatic weakening at high slip rates, with steady-state friction coefficient values of about 0.1 to 0.2. Specific fracture energy ranges from 1 to 4 MN/m in our results and this is of the same order as seismically determined values. Low friction coefficients measured on experimental faults are in broad agree- ment with lack of thermal anomaly observed from temperature measurements in WFSD-1 drill hole （Wenchuan Earthquake Fault Scientific Drilling Project）, which can be explained by even smaller friction coefficient for the Wenchuan earthquake fault. High-velocity friction experiments with pore water needs to be done to see if even smaller friction is attained or not. Shiny slickenside surfaces form at high slip rates, but not at slow slip rates. Slip zone with slickenside surface changes its color to dark brown and forms duplex-like microstructures, which are similar to those microstructures found in the fault gouges from the Hongkou outcrop. Detailed comparisons between experimentally deformed gouge samples and WFSD drill cores in the future will reveal how much we could reproduce the dynamic weakening processes in operation in fault zones during Wenchuan earthquake at present.

An Experimental Study on Measurement Methods of Bulk Density and Porosity of Rock Samples

Density and porosity are fundamental and important physical properties of rocks in various geological problems, and affect the other physical properties. Therefore, measurements of density and porosity of rock samples are important investigation items in both geo-science and geo-engineering areas. Several measurement techniques of the density and porosity are available and being applied currently. To ensure the data quality and to conduct its quality assessment, comparison of measurement results by different measurement techniques is necessary since the techniques are based on different principles and test procedures. In this study, we collected eight types of rock samples including a gabbro, a granite, four sandstones, a welded tuff and a mudstone as study materials, and also prepared several metal specimens for the experimental comparison. The porosities of the eight rocks covered a very wide range from 0.3% to 50% approximately. We employed three methods (caliper, buoyancy and helium-displacement pycnometer) to measure volumes of regularly-shaped specimens and to determine their bulk densities and porosities. As a result, the three techniques yielded almost same bulk densities and porosities for all the specimens. In addition, we also applied mercury intrusion porosimetry to measure density and porosity as well as to determine pore size distribution of the rock samples. Porosity values obtained by the porosimetry method were underestimated in the case of high-porosity (soft) rock samples and overestimated for the very low-porosity rock samples. Ability to determine pore size distribution, however, is a very important advantage of the porosimetry method.