A comparison of seismic and structural measurements of scaling exponents during tensile subcritical crack growth

The observed fractal nature of both fault length distributions and earthquake magnitude-frequency distributions suggests that there may be a relationship between the structure of active fault systems and the resulting seismicity. In previous theoretical work, a positive correlation between the exponent D from the fracture length distribution, and the seismic or acoustic emission (AE) b-value has been inferred from a simple dislocation model of the seismic source. Here, we present the first experimental evidence for a correlation between D and b from a series of tensile fracture mechanics tests on crystalline rock, carried out in different environmental conditions, both air-dry and water-saturated, and at ambient temperature and pressure. The microseismic acoustic emissions were monitored during subcritical crack growth under controlled conditions of constant stress intensity, K_I, and quantitative analyses of the resulting fracture patterns were carried out on the same specimens. It is found that AE b-values, ranging from 1.0 to 2.3, correlate negatively with the normalized stress intensity K_I/KIC, where K_IC is the fracture toughness of the specimen. The microcrack length distribution exponent D, ranges from 1.0 to 1.7. Fluid presence has a first-order influence on both the AE and structure produced in these experiments. For experiments at low stress intensity or high fluid content, the activation of the stress corrosion mechanism for K_I < K_IC leads to a greater relative proportion both of small cracks and of low amplitude acoustic emissions, reflected in higher values of D and b. The exponent D is found to correlate positively with the AE b-value.