• Journal of the Mineralogical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2009

The study area is a tunnelling section passing through the Yangsan Fault zone. Kyungbu express highway and national road 35 are located above the tunnel. Previous study showed that fault gouge and fault breccia were widely distributed in the tunnelling section with a maximum width of 100 m. From the present study, it is found that sedimentary rocks consisting mainly of shale are distributed at the eastern block of the Yangsan Fault and these rocks are not subject to mechanical fracturing and hydrothermal alteration. On the other hand, dacitic tuff distributed at the western block of the Yangsan Fault is largely affected by mechanical fracturing and hydrothermal alteration. The large fault zone of $50{\sim}130m$ width was formed by complex processes of mechanical fracturing and hydrothermal alterations such as chloritization, sericitization, and kaolinization. Based on the characteristics of mechanical fracturing and hydrothermal alterations, the Yangsan fault zone in the study area is geotechnically classified as four zones: unaltered zone, altered zone, altered fractured zone, and fault gouge zone. These zones show different degrees and aspects in mechanical fracturing and hydrothermal alterations, resulting in different engineering properties.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.43-53
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• 2006

Hydraulic fracturing is an important and abundant process in both industrial applications and natural environments. The formation of hydraulic fractures includes nucleation, growth, and termination in numerous rock types and stress regimes, at scales ranging from microns to many kilometers. As a result, fracture segmentation, commonly observed at all scales and in all geo-materials, contributes to this complexity in many ways. In particular, the mechanical interaction of fracture segments strongly affect almost all hydraulic fracturing processes. In this paper, the segmented fracture opening deformation in rock by hydraulic fracturing is quantified using boundary collocation method and is compared with non-interacting single fracture.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.65-71
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• 2009

Hydraulic fracturing technology has been widely applied in the industry for the recovery of the natural resources such as gas, oil and geothermal heat from hot dry rock. During hydraulic fracturing stimulation, multiple cracks are created resulting in mechanical interaction between cracks. Such an interaction influences obtaining hydraulic fracturing key parameters (crack opening, length, and borehole net pressure). The boundary collocation method (BCM) has been proved to be very effective in considering mechanical interaction. However, for better confidence, it needs to be verified by comparison with analytical solutions such as stress intensity factors. In this paper, three cases, single fracture in remote uniaxial tension, single fracture in remote shear stress field and two arbitrary segments in an infinite plane loaded at infinity are considered. As a result, the BCM is proved to be valid technique to consider mechanical interaction between cracks and can be used to estimate the hydraulic fracturing parameters such as opening of the fracture, and so on.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.135-141
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• 2009

Fracturing technique using fluid injection into the borehole is widely used technology in the industry for the geothermal heat, oil, and gas extraction. Dealing with fluid-driven natural fractures such as dike and vein indirectly, design technology would be improved by adapting their principles. In this paper, mechanical interaction between the segments is evaluated by modeling highly segmented and closely spaced fluid-driven natural fractures. The number of segments is 71 with 3,339 measured apertures in which the interaction is considerably predicted. To evaluate mechanical interaction, boundary collocation method is used and the net pressure is calculated by using least square method to fit measured apertures. As a result, in case that mechanical interaction is considered, two pressures as fitting parameters are sufficient to capture measured apertures.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.175-188
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• 1998

This paper describes the internal structures and K-Ar ages of fault gouges collected from the Dongnae fault zone. This fault zone is internally zoned and occurs in the multiple fault cores. A fault core consists of thin gouge and narrow cataclastic zones that are bounded by a much thicker damage zone. Intensity of deformation and alteration increases from damage zone through cataclastic zone to gouge zone. It is thought that cataclasis of brittle deformation was the dominant strain-accomodation mechanism in the early stage of deformation to form the gouge zone and that crushed materials in the regions of maximum localization of fault slip subsequently moved by cataclastic flow. Deformation mechanism drastically changed from brittle processes to fluid-assisted flow along the gouge zone as the high porosity and permeability of pulverzied materials during faulting facilitated the influx of the hydrothermal fluids. Subsequently, the fluids reacted with gouge materials to form clay minerals. Fracturing and alteration could have repeatedly taken place in the gouge zone by elevated fluid pressures generated from the reduction of pore volume due to the formation of clay minerals and precipitation of other materials. XRD analysis revealed that the most common clay minerals of the gouge zones are illite and smectite with minor zeolite and kaolinite. Most of illites are composed of 1Md polytype, indicating the products of hydrothermal alteration. The major activities of the Dongnae fault can be divided into two periods based upon K-Ar age data of the fault gouges : 51.4∼57.5Ma and 40.3∼43.6Ma. Judging from the enviromental condition of clay mineral formation, it is inferred that the hydrothermal alteration of older period occured at higher temperature than that of younger period.

• Journal of The Geomorphological Association of Korea
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

This studied area is divided into the mountains and the valleys. The former is nearly consisted of the badland, the latter is consisted of alluvial plains in the valley, fluvial terrace at the side of the river, alluvial fans between mountains and river terrace. There are many tors, mushroom rocks, sugarloaves, weathering pits, castle coppies, columnar rocks, pinnacles, balanced rocks carved on tuff by means of erosion in the Chiricahua Nat'l Monument. Willcox Playa is alkalic crust where was lake in pleistocene epoch at the time wetter than present. Alkalic crust was made of Ca, Na, K etc. There are sand dunes around here where was lake side in the past. We found many kinds of fossils at the 2,000ft thick horizons of valley alluvium. Pediment and alluvium bordered at the base of Mt. Dragoon wavily. Exfoliation and spalling and sheeting resulted in boulders around here. Tucson is alluvial plain filled in thick 7,0000ft valley. Volcano, fault, erosion, alluvium were and are processing in this area.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.45-52
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• 2005

Recent observations based on geological evidence and laboratory tests confirm that complex segmentation of hydraulic fractures is common phenomena. It is expected that the segmentation causes mechanical interaction between the fractures and affects fracture opening and measured net pressure. In this study, therefore, the opening of the fractures is computed using boundary collocation method to evaluate the mechanical interaction quantitatively. Also, improved boundary collocation method is suggested to evaluate the displacement of the fracture wall accurately and the reliability of this method is confirmed by comparing with that of the finite element method.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.125-133
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• 2009

Rock fracturing technique through fluid injection into the wellbore has been widely used to extract geothermal heat and to enhance oil and gas production. Single fracture formation is ideal for the production. However, it is very difficult to form single fracture formation. Instead, the formation of segmented fracture is a common phenomenon. Therefore, design parameters are expected to be different from those of single fracture because of mechanical interaction between segmented fractures. In this paper, design parameters such as length, aperture, and net pressure are evaluated by using model of segmented fracture in which numerical technique is incorporated to consider mechanical interaction between segments. Results show that the existence of fracture segmentation affects design parameters in fracturing treatment in rock by fluid injection.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.30-37
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• 2013

A soft rock fracture zone is an important element for rock slope or earth retaining, however stability studies of earth retaining wall have been lack. Therefore, this study is analyzed for a behavior of earth retaining wall with condition of fracture zone or no fracture zone and then a numerical analysis (Finite Element Method) was performed considering interaction with field monitoring data between ground and structures. As a result, applied horizontal displacement on retaining wall is correspond between result of numerical analysis and field monitoring data and displacement point stress distribution with fracture zone condition analyzed to be stable side but no fracture zone condition is expressed to be unstable side. The results of this study is purpose for applying safety construction as a top priority at field when designing for future.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.183-189
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• 2010

Fault gouge samples were collected from the fault cores of the boundary faults between the Cretaceous Basement and the Tertiary Waeup Basin. Fractal dimensions (D) were obtained by using survivor grains which were analysed from six thin sections of the gouges under the optical microscope. The elliptical survivor grains show a shape preferred orientation almost parallel to clay foliation in matrix, suggesting that it was formed by the rotation of the survivor grains in abundant fine-grained matrix during repeated fault slips. The size distributions of the survivor grains follow power-laws with fractal dimensions in the 2.40-3.02 range. D values of all samples but one are higher than a specific D value equal to 2.58 which predicts the self similarity of fragmentation process in constrained comminution model (Sammis et al., 1987), which indicates large fault slip and multiple faulting. Probably the higher D values than 2.58 mean the non-self-similar evolution of cataclastic rocks where fragmentation mechanism changed from constrained comminution to the grain abrasion accompanying selective fracture of larger grains.