The Influence Of Rock Anisotropy On Stress Measurements By Overcoring Techniques

A medium is anisotropic if its properties vary with direction. This is the general characteristic of many rocks, for example, schists, slates, gneisses, phyllites and other metamorphic rocks. Bedded and regularly jointed rocks also display anisotropic behavior. This paper is concerned with the influence of rock anisotropy on in-situ stress measurements. It is limited to stress measurements by overcoring techniques for which strains and displacements are recorded either on the walls of a pilot hole at the end of one or several boreholes or within instrumented solid or hollow inclusions perfectly bonded to the surface of the pilot hole. The rock is described as homogeneous, continuous, anisotropic and linearly elastic. The following questions are answered with special emphasis on rocks that can be classed as transversely isotropic or orthotropic: the number of independent measurements obtainable in a single borehole; the number of boreholes required to determine the in-situ stress field; the influence of rock anisotropy on these numbers; the influence of the anisotropy type and the error involved by neglecting rock anisotropy.