Effect of delay time on In Situ Stress Determination by Acoustic Emission

The in-situ stress is one of the most important parameters in the design of underground structures. Conventional methods such as in-situ stress measurements using hydraulic fracturing method has two main disadvantages are time and cost of this methods. Acoustic emission is one of the indirect in-Situ stress measurement methods which is based on the theory of the Kaiser effect. When a rock is stressed, it release acoustic signals this phenomenon is called acoustic emission. Kaiser Effect is defined as lack of acoustic signals in the lower stress levels than the previous maximum stress level. In other words, as long as rock is not reached to the previous maximum stress level, do not show significant acoustic emission. Several factors affect on Kaiser Effect such as delay time, temperature, rock fabric, porosity, discontinuities, joints and geological structure. In this paper, effect of the delay time on Kaiser Effect has been presented. The time between coring operations and acoustic emission test is called delay time. The limestone rock is selected as main samples of test and after preloading, reloading and acoustic emission test were carried out with different delay times. The results showed that the felicity ratio is less than 1, when delay time is about 20 days and after three months has increased to be more than one.