Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Senior Project

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (BS)

Department

Geological Engineering

First Advisor

Zheng-Wen Zeng

Abstract

This paper is a proposal for designing the Kaiser In‐Situ Stress (KISS) System. The KISS System’s goal is to determine in‐situ stresses in rock formations and other subsurface rocks by means of compression‐induced Acoustic Emission (AE) and the Kaiser effect. The KISS System is a non‐destructive method of in‐situ stress determination and has received much attention in the past. To fully understand AE, the Kaiser Effect and how it relates to stress determination this paper will present the necessary theoretical background, past experimentation and results from the authors own experimentation to investigate the plausibility of AE and the Kaiser Effect for in‐situ stress determination. The final goal of the design is to investigate the uniaxial compression induced AE and the Kaiser Effect in rock to determine the fundamental process of the Kaiser Effect. Once confirmation of the Kaiser Effect from the uniaxial compression method is obtained, based on experimentation, more sophisticated experimentation with triaxial compression‐induced AE and the Kaiser Effect can be analyzed.

Besides only proposing the KISS System as a theoretical design this paper also presents results from an initial design/prototype KISS System. In order to find out the plausibility of using AE and the Kaiser Effect for in‐situ stress determination, experimentation had to be conducted using fundamental processes. Theoretical work on AE and the Kaiser effect has been investigated extensively and the only way to determine scientific plausibility is by empirical observation and analysis. The process investigates uniaxial compression induced AE to determine the presence of the Kaiser effect. By actually performing the experiments that quantify physical phenomena comparisons can be made to see if uniaxial compression induced AE can determine in‐situ stresses and be developed further to determine true states of in‐situ stress.

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