Facilities

Experimental facilities have almost all been designed, built, commissioned and tested in-house, under the supervision of Dr Stephen Elphick. Funding has come from a suite of competitive research grants, since the inauguration of the group by the then Petroleum Science and Technology Institute. Currently our facilities include:

• A low-temperature ‘flow rig’, coupled to high-performance liquid chromatography equipment for advective fluid-rock interaction studies
• A large-capacity (10-cm diameter core) ‘big rig’ for deformation of whole core samples, and production of deformation bands
• A servo-controlled ‘creep’ rig for time-dependent deformation studies
• A dual-sample actuator for parallel fault gouge diagenesis studies
• Two reaction-advection-dispersion rigs for carbonate diagenesis studies
• A rig for measuring flow and tracer dispersion in low-aperture tensile fractures for environmental applications

Generally our experimental conditions are P<70 MPa, T<120C, representing conditions up to 2-3 km burial depth. Control variables include axial stress, axial strain rate, confining pressure, pore pressure, input pore fluid chemistry, and sample size (diameters from 2.5-10 cm, lengths from 8-30 cm). Contemporaneous measurement of porosity change, fluid permeability, output pore-fluid chemistry, and/or acoustic emissions and electrical conductivity are also available.

Computational facilities include access to the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, one of the major computing resources in Europe, for the study of deformation mechanisms and fluid-rock interactions in complex media, using a variety of numerical models (cellular automata, finite difference and finite element calculations).