A new experimental device developed to study the creeping behavior of a rock joint under shear stress
Résumé
Abstract In the context of nuclear waste management project Cigeo, the behavior of the fractured Callovo Oxfordian claystone (CO x ) is studied for its time dependent effect on the long term convergences of the drifts. We present an experimental setup designed to investigate the viscous behavior of a fracture. While few experimental setup already exist with the purpose of studying the time dependent deformation of a rock joint, all of them measure the displacement in the direction of the sheared discontinuities in one point of the sample with devices such as a linear variable displacement transducers (lvdt). The information provided by this sensor comes to measuring the average displacement of the fracture slip. Depending on the configuration of the experimental device, the lvdt sometimes also measures the deformation of the rock medium which cannot always be considered as a rigid body. Which is why we propose in this paper to set a camera up in order to use Digital Image Correlation to get an information of the slip along the fracture.