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Granular Controls on Periodicity of Stick-Slip Events: Kinematics and Force-Chains in an Experimental Fault

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Abstract

It is a long-standing question whether granular fault material such as gouge plays a major role in controlling fault dynamics such as seismicity and slip-periodicity. In both natural and experimental faults, granular materials resist shear and accommodate strain via interparticle friction, fracture toughness, fluid pressure, dilation, and interparticle rearrangements. Here, we isolate the effects of particle rearrangements on granular deformation through laboratory experiments. Within a sheared photoelastic granular aggregate at constant volume, we simultaneously visualize both particle-scale kinematics and interparticle forces, the latter taking the form of force-chains. We observe stick-slip deformation and associated force drops during an overall strengthening of the shear zone. This strengthening regime provides insight into granular rheology and conditions of stick-slip periodicity, and may be qualitatively analogous to slip that accompanies longer term interseismic strengthening of natural faults. Of particular note is the observation that increasing the packing density increases the stiffness of the granular aggregate and decreases the damping (increases time-scales) during slip events. At relatively loose packing density, the slip displacements during the events follow an approximately power-law distribution, as opposed to an exponential distribution at higher packing density. The system exhibits switching between quasi-periodic and aperiodic slip behavior at all packing densities. Higher packing densities favor quasi-periodic behavior, with a longer time interval between aperiodic events than between quasi-periodic events. This difference in the time-scale of aperiodic stick-slip deformation is reflected in both the kinematics of interparticle slip and the force-chain dynamics: all major force-chain reorganizations are associated with aperiodic events. Our experiments conceptually link observations of natural fault dynamics with current models for granular stick-slip dynamics. We find that the stick-slip dynamics are consistent with a driven harmonic oscillator model with damping provided by an effective viscosity, and that shear-transformation-zone, jamming, and crackling noise theories provide insight into the effective stiffness and patterns of shear localization during deformation.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Karin Dahmen and Luc Lavier for sharing key modeling results, and to Stefanos Papanikolaou and James Sethna for sharing the Wiener filtering technique. Three anonymous reviewers contributed to the revision of the manuscript. KLF and KED have been supported by a North Carolina State University FRPD and NSF CAREER award DMR-0766743. LD and NWH have been supported by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) under an Innovation and Opportunity grant; this is UTIG contribution #2315.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas, 10100 Burnet Rd., Bldg. 196, Austin, TX, 78758-4445, USA

    Nicholas W. Hayman & Lucie Ducloué

  2. Département de Physique, École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75 005, Paris, France

    Lucie Ducloué

  3. Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Kate L. Foco & Karen E. Daniels

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  1. Nicholas W. Hayman
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Correspondence to Karen E. Daniels.

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Hayman, N.W., Ducloué, L., Foco, K.L. et al. Granular Controls on Periodicity of Stick-Slip Events: Kinematics and Force-Chains in an Experimental Fault. Pure Appl. Geophys. 168, 2239–2257 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0269-3

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