Effective Physical Parameter Evaluation of Shallow Crustal Rocks by Lattice Element Method

Abstract

Abstract Behavior of materials at high temperature and pressure is of interest in many engineering and scientific applications, such as, Borehole Heat Exchanger, Ground Source Heap Pump, Deep and shallow geothermal energy generation and deep cast mining. A direct measurement of the buried rock mass is not fissile in most of the cases and correlations based of seismic wave velocities are developed. However, these correlations are affected largely by many physio-chemical anomalies and micro and meso scale effects in the rock mass and are developed for a chosen set of rocks. Here, we propose a lattice based meso-scale model to capture the behavior of shallow crustal rocks at high temperature and pressure and calculate the effective parameters, such as, effective shear moduli and Poisson’s ratio with change in the applied thermal and/or mechanical loads. The computed values by lattice element method are validated against the experimental results and are found to be in acceptable error range.