MICROMETER SCALE MORPHOLOGY MEASUREMENT SYSTEM: A NEW TECHNIQUE FOR MICRO-TOPOGRAPHY MEASUREMENT ON FAULT PLANES

Earthquakes commonly occur in the sliding surface of the fault zone. The morphology of the sliding surface is the result of fault activities, and also it evolves with the activities. The irregular geometry of the fault plane affects the sliding resistance, the concentration and anisotropy of the stress distribution within the fault plane and the fault shear strength. So, the acquisition of high-precision morphological features is of great significance for studying the correlation between fault surface morphology and seismic nucleation, fracture propagation and termination. Due to the lack of reliable micron-scale morphological measurement apparatus, the study of the coherence of the fault surface morphology from large scale(unit: m-cm)to small scale(unit: μm)is subject to restrictions, as well as the study of the relationship between the micro-morphology of the experimental frictional surface and the rupture process. In order to improve the measurement accuracy of the fault plane and overcome the shortcomings of existing measurement methods, we have invented a morphology measurement system with independent intellectual property rights.
The measuring principle of this morphology measurement system is based on the laser rangefinder theory. The frame of this system consists of four parts: Braced Frame, Moving Scanner Unit, System-Controlling Unit and Data Collection Unit. Braced Frame is made up of high-adjustable frame, loading stage, dust-proof box and isolation platform, which is used to provide a vibration isolation, light proof and dust-proof measuring environment. Moving Scanner Unit contains a laser head and a two-dimensional translation stag, the laser head is used to measure vertical distance and a two-dimensional translation stage carrying a laser head moving in X-axis and Y-axis orientation to provide X, Y coordinate values. System-Controlling Unit includes two-dimensional translation stage controller, laser head controller and signal convertor. The function of this part is mainly to control operation of other parts. The Data Collection Unit is composed of computer system and software module. This part connects other parts for receiving and storing data. In order to improve the scan efficiency, we developed new software by which we can precisely control the measuring process and efficiently process the acquired data. The software is comprised of five modules: 1)Move Module, this module is used to control the original moving of the laser head relative to the two-dimension translation stage and display the 3-dimensional coordinate information in real time; 2)Set Parameters of Scan Area, the function of this module is to obtain the XY coordinate values of four corner points of the target area to scan; 3)Scan Method Module, though this part, we can control the point spacing in the X-axis orientation by inputting velocity of laser header, as well as the point spacing in X-axis orientation by inputting the Y-step parameter; 4)Pre-Scan Module, there are three functions in this module to inspect whether the z-value of the target area is beyond the range of the laser head or not, estimate consuming time for scanning the object area under the predefined parameters and to estimate the size of the result file; and 5)Scan Module, the function of this module is to store the scanning data.
We scanned the camera lens and the standard plate whose standard deviations are lower than 5μm to acquire the precision of the measurement system, and the results show that the precision of the plane positioning (X-axis and Y-axis direction)is better than 3.5μm; the vertical measurement precision is better than 4.5μm. The highest resolution of the measurement system is constrained by the performance of the laser head and two-dimension translation stage, and the horizontal resolution can reach 0.62μm, vertical resolution 0.25μm. When the needed resolution is lower than the highest, we can achieve it through adjusting the parameter of the velocity in the X-axis orientation and steps in the Y-axis orientation. To test the practical effect of the measurement system, we scanned an area of frictional surface of experimental rock using this system and obtained a high-resolution topography data. From the DEM interpolated from the cloud data, we can observe the striation on the fault plane and the variation of the roughness distribution. The roughness and slope distribution results show that the topography measurement system can meet our requirements for analyzing the microscopic morphology on the micrometer scale.
Compared with traditional measurement devices, the morphology measurement system has the following advantages: 1)The measurement system can obtain the data even in a valley region with a large dip angle on the surface because the vertically emitted beam by the laser head is practically perpendicular to the surface. So compared with other means, it can avoid producing a blank area of measurements and get a complete area; 2)the measurement system has a larger measurement range of 30cm×30cm. When the high-resolution measurement is performed on a large scale, the error caused by the registration of multiple measurement results can also be avoided.