In Situ Stress Measurement

The in situ state of stress in the earth’s crust has been widely recognized as a basic parameter necessary in the engineering design of underground openings. Quantitative evaluation of horizontal in situ stresses in rock at a specific site cannot be made since gravitational forces are practically the only one clearly understood. Therefore, these horizontal stresses require direct measurements in the field. Presently the most common method of measuring in situ stress from near-surface to considerable depths is hydraulic fracturing (or hydrofrac).

Typically hydraulic fracturing is conducted in vertical boreholes. A short segment of the hole is sealed off using an straddle packer. This is followed by the pressurization of the fracture-free segment of the hole by pumping in water. The pressure is raised until the rock surrounding the hole fails in tension at a critical pressure. Following breakdown, the shut-in pressure, the lowest test-interval pressure at which the hydrofrac closes completely under the action of the stress acting normal to the hydrofrac. In a vertical test hole the hydrofrac is expected to be vertical and perpendicular to the minimum horizontal stress. An impression impression packer or borehole logging devices can be used to obtain the orientation of the hydrofrac which yields the direction of the maximum horizontal stress.

Applications

Hydrofrac is commonly conduted in large scale underground construction and earthquake research projects:

• Nuclear waste disposal repository design
• Oil-Gas storage design
• Pumped energy storage design T
• ransportation tunnel design
• Natural & manmade earthquake studies
• Waste injection for environmental restoration
• Enhancement of oil/groundwater recovery

The magnitudes and directions of in situ stresses around the investigation site provide the crucial design parameters: initial stress conditions around the prospective site; orientation of the drift; depth of the opening; stability analysis of the opening.

Test Set-Up

The major downhole instruments involved in hydraulic fracturing in situ stress measurement method are: Straddle packer system for fracture initiation and extension, Impression- orienting system for fracture delineation. A tripod and a wireline hoist replace the conventional drill rig and drill pipes. Using wireline fast and continuous tool tripping is possible without tool retrieval to the surface after each test. A laptop PC-based Analog-to-Digital converter records and stores pressure-flowrate-time data reliably. The wireline system allows the user to measure the in situ state of stress near the future underground opening more affordably by improving its cost-effectiveness through the use of a wireline in place of the conventional drill-pipe method.

Analysis

A PC-based interactive data acquisition and analysis software package minimizes uncertainties in recording and analyzing hydrofrac data. The analysis package is based on the statistical routines (Lee and Haimson, 1988, 1991) developed for identifying key test parameters: shut-in pressure, fracture reopening pressure, dip and dip direction of hydrofracture.

Selected References

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