The roles of time and displacement in the evolution effect in rock friction

Beeler, N. M.; Tullis, Terry E.; Weeks, John D.

doi:10.1029/94gl01599

Cited by 316 publications

(457 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…On the other hand, there is strong experimental evidence that frictional surfaces undergo time-dependent healing at zero slip speed [Dieterich and Kilgore, 1994;Beeler et al, 1994], behavior that the slip law cannot accommodate. For this reason the aging law has become the law of choice among modelers over the last decade.…”

Section: What Experiments Showmentioning

confidence: 99%

Episodic slow slip events and rate‐and‐state friction

Rubin¹

2008

J. Geophys. Res.

224

271

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[1] There are several ways of generating episodic slow slip events in models of rate-and-state friction. Here I explore the possibility that they arise on velocity-weakening faults whose length is ''tuned'' in some sense. Unlike spring-block sliders, which have a unique critical stiffness for instability, elastically deformable faults have multiple length scales (stiffnesses) relevant to nucleation. Slow slip events occur when the fault is large enough to initiate an event but too small for that event to reach dynamic instability. The available window of lengths depends upon the effective fracture energy of the growing nucleation zone. For the ''aging'' evolution law this fracture energy increases rapidly with slip speed, and the range of permissible lengths increases nearly as b/(b À a), where a and b are the coefficients of the velocity and state dependence of the frictional strength. This range becomes very large for faults that are near velocity-neutral (a $ b). However, existing lab data firmly favor the ''slip'' law as a predictor of nucleation style, and for this law the effective fracture energy increases much less rapidly with slip speed. The range of fault lengths capable of hosting slow slip events in this case seems too small to explain why they are common to so many subduction zones. Slow slip can be stabilized over an exceedingly large range of fault lengths if the fracture energy increases with slip speed much more rapidly than for the aging law. An appealing mechanism is inelastic dilation of the fault zone coupled with pore pressure reduction and diffusive recovery.

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Section: What Experiments Showmentioning

confidence: 99%

Episodic slow slip events and rate‐and‐state friction

Rubin¹

2008

J. Geophys. Res.

224

271

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“…This preparatory phase, during which the frictional resistance increases logarithmically with time [Dieterich, 1972;Beeler et al, 1994;Karner et al, 1997;Karner and Marone, 1998;Marone, 1998], has been interpreted as a result of the time-dependent growth of the real asperity contact area between the two opposite rock walls and between the grain particles comprising gouge materials [Mizoguchi et al, 2009]. The present constitutive model assumes that the fault is already prone to rupture, as for the slip-weakening functions [Ida, 1972;Ionescu and Campillo, 1999].…”

Section: Shape Of the Slip-weakening Curvementioning

confidence: 99%

The mechanics of lubricated faults: Insights from 3‐D numerical models

Bizzarri¹

2012

J. Geophys. Res.

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[1] The weakening mechanisms occurring during an earthquake failure are of prominent importance in determining the resulting energy release and the seismic waves excitation. In this paper we consider the fully dynamic response of a seismogenic structure where lubrication processes take place. In particular, we numerically model the spontaneous propagation of a 3-D rupture in a fault zone where the frictional resistance is controlled by the properties of a low viscosity slurry, formed by gouge particles and fluids. This model allows for the description of the fault motion in the extreme case of vanishing effective normal stress, by considering a viscous fault response and therefore without the need to invoke, in the framework of Coulomb friction, the generation of the tensile mode of fracture. We explore the effects of the parameters controlling the resulting governing law for such a lubricated fault; the viscosity of the slurry, the roughness of the fault surfaces and the thickness of the slurry film. Our results indicate that lubricated faults produce a nearly complete stress drop (i.e., a very low residual friction coefficient; m $ 0.01), a high fracture energy density (E G $ few 10s of MJ/m 2 ) and significant slip velocities (v peak $ few 10s of m/s). The resulting values of the equivalent characteristic slip-weakening distance (d 0 eq = 0.1-0.8 m, depending on the adopted parameters) are compatible with the seismological inferences. Moreover, in the framework of our model we found that supershear ruptures are highly favored. In the case of enlarging gap height we can have the healing of slip or even the inhibition of the rupture. Quantitative comparisons with different weakening mechanisms previously proposed in the literature, such as the exponential weakening and the frictional melting, are also discussed.

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“…The direct effect is always represented as a positive, purely slip rate dependent process, while recent work has shown that the negative slip rate dependent evolution effect is due to slip superimposed on an underlying time-dependent process [Beeler et al, 1994], as originally suggested by Dieterich [1978Dieterich [ , 1979. An empirical constitutive equation based on the original relations of Dieterich [1979] was developed by Ruina [1983] the "slowness" equation [Ruina, 1983].…”

Section: Constitutive Equationsmentioning

confidence: 99%