Laboratory Shear Experiments on Granitoid Cores with Fluid Injection

Raw mechanical and acoustic data from 15 shear experiments on granitoid cores from the Utah FORGE site. It explores the effects of pore pressure heterogeneity on fault slip timing and microseismic character, with fluid injection rates ranging from 0.05 to 0.75 mL/min.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between fluid injection rate and triggered shear displacement as a proxy for seismic moment.
• Model shear and normal stress using the provided MATLAB scripts with uniform and non-uniform pore pressure profiles.
• Correlate acoustic emission events and maximum amplitudes from P-wave transducers with shear slip velocity.
• Investigate how pore pressure heterogeneity, controlled by independent servo pumps, influences fault slip timing.

Strengths

• Includes raw data from 15 distinct laboratory experiments.
• Provides MATLAB scripts for importing, plotting, and calculating shear and normal stress from the data.
• Experiments were performed under controlled conditions with specified confining and axial stresses applied to 3 MPa.

Limitations

• The dataset is limited to laboratory-scale experiments on specific granitoid cores, which may not fully represent field-scale geomechanical processes.
• Sample size is relatively small with only 15 experiments, limiting statistical power for some analyses.
• The raw data format and required MATLAB scripts may present a technical barrier for users unfamiliar with the experimental setup or software.

Provenance

Source

Department of Energy

Collection Method

Data recorded from shear experiments in an aluminum triaxial pressure vessel with servo-controlled pumps and LabView interface.

Freshness

Last updated in March 2026.

Geography

Cores sourced from the Utah FORGE EGS demonstration site.