Posts Categorized: Young Projects

At the largest scale, fractures give rise to volcanoes and earthquakes and at engineering scales they form pathways for fluids to flow through and reduce the strength of rock. For these reasons, the study of rock fractures has been a…

  The demand for underground radioactive waste repositories makes  the study of thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) processes in rocks an increasingly important topic. In collaboration with the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) we  conducted triaxial deformation experiments on Cobourg limestone, an argillaceous sedimentary rock found in…

The heart of the Rock Fracture Dynamics Facility is a technologically advanced true-triaxial computer controlled rock deformation system with integral permeability measurement and geophysical imaging capability. For the first time, it is possible to carry out multi-axis thermo-mechanical, geophysical, and hydrological measurements essentially…

Hydraulic fracturing is the initiation and propagation of a fracture by means of fluid pressurization. Hydraulic fracturing has grown in popularity over the past couple of decades in response to increasing public demand for energy alternatives, the discovery of large…