• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
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• 2004.03b
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• pp.815-822
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• 2004

A knowledge of in situ stress state is important to design various engineering structures such as dams, tunnels and so on. There are about three wellknown indicators that is, borehole will breakouts, hydraulic fracturing, ellipsoidal cross section of borehole that have been attributed to the state of stress in the vicinity of borehole. Fortunately, Televiewer traveltime image can be used as a caliper log with 144 or 288 arms, which allows to determine the borehole shape. Televiewer amplitude image will give detailed information about the distribution and character of breakouts and hydraulic fracturing as well. For investigation purposes, a series of boreholes(total 195 boreholes: 12.239m) that have been logged all over the country during past 10 years are analyzed. The primary objective of this paper are to examnine the ability of a Televiewer to determine the shape of borehole, to present data inferred by stress indicators, to indicate their possible relationship with the anisotropic horizontal stresses. It is shown that in most cases the fracture orientation statistically estimated from observed fractures denotes an excellent correlation with the orientations inferred by stress indicators. Many intervals of breakouts are terminated at the intersection of oblique fracture with the borehole. The results from Televiewer data are further compared with those of hydraulic fracturing techniques.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.225-236
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• 2000

We conducted laboratory simulations of deep vertical drilling into the earth's crust to induce borehole breakouts and investigated their potential use for estimating in situ stress magnitudes in Westerly granite and Berea sandstone. Our experiments consisted of two major stages, a series of triaxial tests and borehole-breakout formation tests under a wide range of far-field stresses. We derived the Mohr-Coulomb, Nadai and Mogi failure criteria from the triaxial test results. Each criterion was compared with the stress condition at breakout boundaries. We concluded that the well known Mohr-Coulomb criterion is not compatible with the stress condition at breakout failure. On the other hand, polyaxial (truly triaxial) failure criteria such as the Nadai criterion for Berea sandstone and the Mogi criterion for Westerly granite were much more suitable for predicting breakout failure zone. Such failure criteria appeared to enable the reliable estimation of the magnitude of one of two horizontal principal stresses if the other one is known.

• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.31-42
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• 1998

Recently crosshole seismic tomography has come to be widely used especially for the civil engineering, because it can provide more detail information than any other surface method, although the resolution of tomogram will be inevitably deteriorated to some extent due to the limited wavefield aperture on the nonuniqueness of traveltime inversion. In addition, our field sites often consist of a high-velocity bed rock overlain by low-velocity rock, sometimes with a contrast of more than 45 percent, and furthermore the bed rock is folded. The first arriving waves can be then the refracted ones that travel along the bed rock surface for some source/receiver distances. Thus, the desirable first arrivals can be easily misread that cause severe distortion of the resulting tomogram, if it is concerned with (straight ray) traveltime inversion procedure. In this case, comparision with synthetic data (forward modeling) is a valuable tool in the interpretation process. Besides, abundant information is contained in the crosshole data. For instance, examination of tube waves can be devoted to detecting discontinuities within the borehole such as breakouts, faults, fractures or shear zones as well as the end of the borehole. Specific frequency characteristics of marine silty mud will help discriminate from other soft rocks. The aim of this paper is to present several strategies to analyze and interpret the crosshole data in order to improve the ability at first to determine the spatial dimensions of interwell anomalies and furthermore to understand the underground structures. To this end, our field data are demonstrated. Possibility of misreading the first arrivals was illustrated. Tube waves were investigated in conjunction with the televiewer images. Use of shot- and receiver gathers was examined to benefit the detectabilities of discontinuities within the borehole.