Effect of frictional heating and thermal advection on pre-seismic sliding: a numerical simulation using a rate-, state- and temperature-dependent friction law

Abstract

Abstract Laboratory experiments on simulated faults in rocks clearly show the temperature dependence of dynamic rock friction. Since rocks surrounding faults are permeable, we have developed a numerical method to describe the thermo-mechanical evolution of the pre-seismic sliding phase which takes into account both the rate-, state- and temperature-dependent friction law and the heat advection term in the energy equation. We consider a laminar fluid motion perpendicular to a vertical fault plane and assume that fluids move away from the fault plane. A semi-analytical temperature solution which accounts for the variability of slip velocity and stress on the fault has been found. This solution has been generalized to the case of a time varying fluid velocity and then was used to include the thermal pressurization effect. After discretizing the temperature solution, the evolution of the system is obtained by the solution of a system of first order differential equations which allows us to determine the evolution of slip, slip rate, friction coefficient, effective normal stress, temperature and fluid velocity. The numerical solutions are found using a Runge-Kutta method with an adaptative stepsize control in time. When the thermal pressurization effects can be neglected, the heat advection effect gives rise to a delay, with respect to the purely conductive case, of the earthquake occurrence time. This delay increases with increasing permeability H of the system. When the thermal pressurization effects are taken into account the situation is opposite, i.e. the onset of instability tends to precede that of the purely conductive case. The advance in the time of occurrence of instability increases with increasing coefficient of thermal pressurization. In the small permeability range ( H ≤ 10 −18 m 2 ), the seismic moment and nucleation length of the pre-seismic phase are significantly smaller than those predicted by the purely conductive model.