Electrical impedance spectroscopy measurements to estimate the uniaxial compressive strength of a fault breccia

Abstract

Fault breccias are usually not suitable for preparing smooth specimens or else the preparation of such specimens is tedious, time consuming and expensive. To develop a predictive model for the uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of a fault breccia from electrical resistivity values obtained from the electrical impedance spectroscopy measurements, twenty-four samples of a fault breccia were tested in the laboratory. The UCS values were correlated with corresponding resistivity values and a strong correlation between them could not be found. However, a strong correlation was found for the samples having volumetric block proportion (VBP) of 25-75%. In addition, it was seen that VBP strongly correlated with resistivity. It was concluded that the UCS of the tested breccia can be estimated from resistivity for the samples having VBP of 25-75%.