The stress memory in rocks: insight from the deformation rate analysis (DRA) and acoustic emission (AE)

Deformation rate analysis (DRA) and Acoustic Emission (AE) are popular methods of in-situ stress measurements from oriented cored rocks which take advantage of the rock stress memory also known as the Kaiser effect. These methods rely on the accurate measurement of a point of inflection in the characteristic DRA and AE curves, however, due to the complex geological stress history in rocks, locating point of inflection can be problematic. In order to better understand the stress memory experiments were performed on a combination of six different types of soft, and hard crystalline rocks including concrete with no stress history. The effect of loading modes, strain rates, and time delay were studied on preloaded rock specimens to investigate their influence on the stress memory. A fading effect was observed when the number of the cycles in the test were increased which led to the development of a new method of quantifying the preloads. Results show that the type of loading and the loading rate has little to no influence on the Kaiser effect, however, under faster loading rates the Kaiser effect is more distinct. Likewise, no time dependency was observed for time delays up to seven months.