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At least 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1987

Transform fault earthquakes in the North Atlantic: Source mechanisms and depth of faulting

The centroid depths and source mechanisms of 12 large earthquakes on transform faults of the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge were determined from an inversion of long-period body waveforms. The earthquakes occurred on the Gibbs, Oceanographer, Hayes, Kane, 15 deg 20 min, and Vema transforms. The depth extent of faulting during each earthquake was estimated from the centroid depth and the fault width. The source mechanisms for all events in this study display the strike slip motion expected for transform fault earthquakes; slip vector azimuths agree to 2 to 3 deg of the local strike of the zone of active faulting. The only anomalies in mechanism were for two earthquakes near the western end of the Vema transform which occurred on significantly nonvertical fault planes. Secondary faulting, occurring either precursory to or near the end of the main episode of strike-slip rupture, was observed for 5 of the 12 earthquakes. For three events the secondary faulting was characterized by reverse motion on fault planes striking oblique to the trend of the transform. In all three cases, the site of secondary reverse faulting is near a compression jog in the current trace of the active transform fault zone. No evidence was found to support the conclusions of Engeln, Wiens, and Stein that oceanic transform faults in general are either hotter than expected from current thermal models or weaker than normal oceanic lithosphere.

Bergman, Eric A.↗
NASA NTRS1988

Transform fault earthquakes in the North Atlantic - Source mechanisms and depth of faulting

The centroid depths and source mechanisms of 12 large earthquakes on transform faults of the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge were determined from an inversion of long-period body waveforms. The earthquakes occurred on the Gibbs, Oceanographer, Hayes, Kane, 15 deg 20 min, and Vema transforms. The depth extent of faulting during each earthquake was estimated from the centroid depth and the fault width. The source mechanisms for all events in this study display the strike slip motion expected for transform fault earthquakes; slip vector azimuths agree to 2 to 3 deg of the local strike of the zone of active faulting. The only anomalies in mechanism were for two earthquakes near the western end of the Vema transform which occurred on significantly nonvertical fault planes. Secondary faulting, occurring either precursory to or near the end of the main episode of strike-slip rupture, was observed for 5 of the 12 earthquakes. For three events the secondary faulting was characterized by reverse motion on fault planes striking oblique to the trend of the transform. In all three cases, the site of secondary reverse faulting is near a compression jog in the current trace of the active transform fault zone. No evidence was found to support the conclusions of Engeln, Wiens, and Stein that oceanic transform faults in general are either hotter than expected from current thermal models or weaker than normal oceanic lithosphere.

Bergman, Eric A.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Relationships between fault characteristics and seismic responses in a large lab-scale tri-axial injection test conducted on a faulted Castlegate Sandstone

Here to investigate mechanisms causing microseismicity (M w < 2) at a CO 2 injection site, a large-scale triaxial block experiment was carried out on a faulted (saw-cut) cubic-meter of Castlegate Sandstone. The experiment consisted of injection tests at varying differential stresses, while monitoring and recording pore pressure and acoustic emissions (AEs). During the experiment, ~33,000 AEs and ~14 mm of horizontal displacement/slip, like a strike-slip fault movement, occurred. To understand the AE responses and ascertain fault characteristics near the located AEs, we modeled the topography of the fault surface, fault aperture, and fault-gouge thickness using pre- and post-experiment laser scans of the fault surface on each half of the block. Additionally, we characterized surface roughness parallel and perpendicular to slip. Models show crushing and flattening of the fault surfaces can be linked to the spatiotemporal distribution of AEs within 50 mm of the fault surface. Approximately 65% of AEs were in areas with small aperture (≤300 μm); thicker fault gouge was observed in adjacent areas with wider aperture and shows a two-fold reduction in grain size relative to unaltered Castlegate Sandstone. This work provides a conceptual understanding on fault surface evolution, which can be applied towards modeling of seismic slip.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Fluid migration in low-permeability faults driven by decoupling of fault slip and opening

Understanding the response of faults to the injection of high-pressure fluids is important for several subsurface applications, for example, geologic carbon sequestration or energy storage. Lab-based experiments suggest that fluid injection can activate fault slip and that this slip can lead to increased fluid transmission along low-permeability faults. Here we present in situ observations from a cross-borehole fluid-injection experiment in a low-permeability shale-bearing fault, which show fault displacement occurring before fluid-pressure build-up. Comparing these observations with numerical models with differing permeability evolution histories, we find that the observed variation in fluid pressure is best explained by a change in permeability only after the fault fails and slips beyond the pressurized area. Once fluid migration occurs along the fault as a result of slip-induced permeability increase, the fault experiences further opening due to a decrease in the effective normal stress. We then suggest that decoupling of fault slip and opening, leading to a rapid increase in fluid pressurization following the initial fault slip, could be an efficient driver for fluid migration in low-permeability faults.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Rupture Jumping and Seismic Complexity in Models of Earthquake Cycles for Fault Stepovers with Off-Fault Plasticity

ABSTRACT Fault stepovers are prime examples of geometric complexity in natural fault zones that may affect seismic hazard by determining whether an earthquake rupture continues propagating or abruptly stops. However, the long-term pattern of seismicity near-fault stepovers and underlying mechanisms of rupture jumping in the context of earthquake cycles are rarely studied. Leveraging a hybrid numerical scheme combining the finite element and the spectral boundary integral methods, FEBE, we carry out fully dynamic simulations of sequences of earthquakes and aseismic slip for both compressive and tensile stepovers with off-fault plasticity. We consider a rate-and-state friction law for the fault friction and pressure-sensitive Drucker–Prager plasticity for the off-fault bulk response. We observe that the accumulation of plastic deformation, an indication of off-fault damage, is significantly different in the two cases, with more plastic deformation projected in the overlapping region for the tensile stepover. The seismic pattern for a tensile stepover is more complex than for a compressive stepover, and incorporating plasticity also increases complexity, relative to the elastic case. A tensile stepover with off-fault plasticity shows rupture segmentation, temporal clustering, and frequent rupture jumping from one fault to another. These results shed light on possible mechanisms of rupture jumping in fault stepovers as well as the long-term evolution of the fault zone.

Geochemistry & Geophysics↗
DOE OSTI2021

Analysis of Automated Fault Detection and Diagnosis Records as an Indicator of HVAC Fault Prevalence: Methodology and Preliminary Results

Faults in commercial buildings can cause energy waste and other performance problems such as reduced occupant comfort, reduced equipment longevity, and increased noise. However, it is currently unknown how commonly faults occur in different equipment types. A method has been developed to estimate the prevalence of faults in air handling units, air terminal units, and rooftop units. This method includes two types of data. The first is data from several automated fault detection and diagnostics (AFDD) software technologies. This type of data provides a large sample that represents a wide range of building types, geographical locations, and equipment types. It includes fault diagnoses from thousands of buildings around the United States, as well as anonymized metadata describing the building and equipment characteristics. The number of fault records is in the order of 107. However, despite the size and richness of the data sample, this data contains some degree of inaccuracy, i.e., false positive and false negative findings. Therefore, the study includes a second type of data, coming from manual inspection of buildings that have had the same AFDD methods applied to them (from the commercial AFDD offerings). Since the field tests are conducted in buildings with AFDD-generated fault prevalence data, they can be combined with the larger sample size to provide insight into the potential biases or lower sensitivity of the AFDD data. Once a library of fault prevalence data is built, it will be studied to provide further insight into the drivers of fault prevalence, for example, whether prevalence is correlated with building type, geographical location (which is tied to climate and to utility rates), building size, etc. This paper describes the methods developed for this study and illustrates them with preliminary data. It discusses some of the challenges of harmonizing disparate outputs from multiple AFDD vendors, application of a unifying fault taxonomy, and fault prevalence metrics.

Ebrahimi Fakhar, Amir↗
DOE OSTI2018

Precise Fault Location on Transmission Lines Using Ensemble Kalman Filter

Accurate pin-pointing of faults on transmission lines minimizes outage time, labor, and costs. This letter proposes a simple yet effective ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) approach to accurately locating the faults on transmission lines within half-cycle time. The approach is easy to implement and does not require foreknowledge of either the fault type or an approximate guess of the fault location. Extensive results validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the EnKF-based fault location approach.

Fan, Rui↗
DOE OSTI2020

Complexity of Fault Rupture and Fluid Leakage in Shale: Insights From a Controlled Fault Activation Experiment

Abstract We observed rupture growth caused by controlled fluid injections at 340‐m depth within a fault zone in the low‐permeability Opalinus Clay in the Mont Terri Underground Research Laboratory (Switzerland). The rupture mechanisms were evaluated using measurements of the three‐component borehole wall displacements and fluid pressure in two sections of the fault zone and located horizontally 3 m apart from each other. One section was set across a secondary segment of the fault and used for stepwise fluid injection intended to trigger rupture growth. The other section was set across the principal shear zone of the fault for monitoring. After stepwise pressure increase up to 5.95 MPa at injection, rupture initiated as slip activation, followed by an overall opening of the fault planes connected to the injection. After 19 s of continued injection, displacements arrived at the monitoring point on the principal shear zone. These displacements are about 2.4 times larger than in the secondary fault segment. Overall, the displacements corresponded to a normal fault activation. About 9 s after the displacement front arrived, a strong pressure increase of 4.17 MPa was measured at the monitoring point, indicating a hydraulic connection had formed along the initially very low permeability fault planes between the injection and the monitoring points. Our analyses highlight that the fault activation is consistent with the state of stress but that injection pressure must be close to the normal stress acting on the fault for permeability to be generated and for fluid leakage to occur.

Guglielmi, Yves↗
DOE OSTI2020

Analysis of Fault Zone Resonance Modes Recorded by a Dense Seismic Array Across the San Jacinto Fault Zone at Blackburn Saddle

We present observations and modeling of spatial eigen-functions of resonating waves within fault zone waveguide, using data recorded on a dense seismic array across the San Jacinto Fault Zone (SJFZ) in southern California. The array consists of 5-Hz geophones that cross the SJFZ with ~10-30 m spacing at the Blackburn Saddle near the Hemet Stepover. Wavefield snapshots after the S wave arrival are consistent for more than 50 near-fault events, suggesting that this pattern is controlled by the fault zone structure rather than source properties. Data from example event with high signal to noise ratio shows three main frequency peaks at ~1.3 Hz, ~2.0 Hz, and ~2.8 Hz in the amplitude spectra of resonance waves averaged over stations near the fault. The data are modeled with analytical expressions for eigen-functions of resonance waves in a low-velocity layer (fault zone) between two quarter-spaces. Using a grid search-based method, we investigate the possible width of the waveguide, location within the array, and shear wave velocities of the media that fit well the resonance signal at ~1.3 Hz. The results indicate a ~300 m wide damaged fault zone layer with ~65% S wave velocity reduction compared to the host rock. The SW edge of the low-velocity zone is near the mapped fault surface trace, indicating that the damage zone is asymmetrically located at the regionally faster NE crustal block. The imaging resolution of the fault zone structure can be improved by modeling fault zone resonance modes and trapped waves together.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

The Variable Continuous Bimaterial Interface in the San Jacinto Fault Zone Revealed by Dense Seismic Array Analysis of Fault Zone Head Waves

Key factors controlling earthquake ruptures include fault geometry, continuity, and seismic velocity structure around the fault. We present a novel tool that better informs deep bimaterial fault geometry embedded in distributed damage and seismicity, associated velocity contrasts across the fault, and their correlations with surface complexities. The method employs fault zone head and direct body waves and is applied to recordings from five spatiotemporally different seismic arrays along the complex San Jacinto fault zone (SJFZ) in southern California. We detect and distinguish these signals based on instantaneous phase coherence and relative energy in a cascading manner from one scale array to another. The analysis reveals a >70-km long continuous bimaterial interface within the SJFZ with several deep northeast dipping fault segments. The northern SJFZ, for instance, locates ~7 km northeast of its surface expression at 18-km depth. P-wave velocity contrasts range from near 0% to >15%, consistent with other bimaterial faults, and differ by a few % depending on fault-array azimuth, implying directional-dependent velocity contrasts. S-wave head waves and velocity contrasts are also imaged for the first time at the southern SJFZ, averaging to 2.9% in agreement with tomography results. The imaged geometry and continuity suggest the SJFZ initiated along remnant tectonic structures and translates to a rupture potential of M > 7.2, i.e., the sizes of its largest paleo-earthquakes. The P and S contrasts, and their ratios, have important implications for earthquake rupture speed, mode, directivity, and frictional heating along the SJFZ and other major faults globally.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2018

The Fault Detection, Localization, and Tolerant Operation of Modular Multilevel Converters with an Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) Open Circuit Fault

Reliability is one of the critical issues for a modular multilevel converter (MMC) since it consists of a large number of series-connected power electronics submodules (SMs). Here in this paper, a complete control strategy including fault detection, localization, and tolerant operation is proposed for the MMC under an insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) open circuit fault. According to the output characteristics of the SM with the open-circuit fault of IGBT, a fault detection method based on the circulating current and output current observation is used. In order to further precisely locate the position of the faulty SM, a fault localization method based on the SM capacitor voltage observation is developed. After the faulty SM is isolated, the continuous operation of the converter is ensured by adopting the fault-tolerant strategy based on the use of redundant modules. To verify the proposed fault detection, fault localization, and fault-tolerant operation strategies, a 900 kVA MMC system under the conditions of an IGBT open circuit is developed in the Matlab/Simulink platform. The capabilities of rapid detection, precise positioning, and fault-tolerant operation of the investigated detection and control algorithms are also demonstrated.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

An ontology-based fault generation and fault propagation analysis approach for safety-critical computer systems at the design stage

Abstract Fault propagation analysis is a process used to determine the consequences of faults residing in a computer system. A typical computer system consists of diverse components (e.g., electronic and software components), thus, the faults contained in these components tend to possess diverse characteristics. How to describe and model such diverse faults, and further determine fault propagation through different components are challenging problems to be addressed in the fault propagation analysis. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach, which is an integrated method allowing for the generation, injection, and propagation through inference of diverse faults at an early stage of the design of a computer system. The results generated by the proposed framework can verify system robustness and identify safety and reliability risks with limited design level information. In this paper, we propose an ontological framework and its application to analyze an example safety-critical computer system. The analysis result shows that the proposed framework is capable of inferring fault propagation paths through software and hardware components and is effective in predicting the impact of faults.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

The Effect of Fault Geometry and Minimum Shear Wavespeed on 3D Ground-Motion Simulations for an M w 6.5 Hayward Fault Scenario Earthquake, San Francisco Bay Area, Northern California

We investigated the effects of fault geometry and assumed minimum shear wavespeed (V Smin ) on 3D ground-motion simulations (0–2.5 Hz) in general, using a moment magnitude (M w ) 6.5 earthquake on the Hayward fault (HF). Simulations of large earthquakes on the northeast-dipping HF using the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 3D seismic model have shown intensity asymmetry with stronger shaking for the Great Valley Sequence east of the HF (hanging wall) relative to the Franciscan Complex to the west (footwall). We performed simulations with three fault geometries in both plane-layered (1D) and 3D models. Results show that the nonvertical fault geometries result in larger motions on the hanging wall relative to the vertical fault for the same Earth model with up to 50% amplifications in single-component peak ground velocity (PGV) within 10 km of the rupture. Near-fault motions on the footwall are reduced for the nonvertical faults, but less than they are increased on the hanging wall. Simulations assuming V Smin values of 500 and 250 m/s reveal that PGVs are on average 25% higher west of the HF when using the lower V Smin ,with some locations amplified by a factor of 3. Increasing frequency content from 2.5 to 5 Hz increases PGV values. Spectral ratios of these two V Smin cases show average amplifications of 2–4 (0.5–1.5 Hz) for the lower V Smin west of the fault. Large differences (up to 2×) in PGV across the HF from previous studies persist even for the case with a vertical fault or V Smin of 250 m/s. We conclude that assuming a V Smin of 500 m/s underestimates intensities west of the HF for frequencies above 0.5 Hz, and that low upper crustal (depth <10 km) shear wavespeeds defined in the 3D model contribute most to higher intensities east of the HF.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2018

Two sides of a fault: Grain-scale analysis of pore pressure control on fault slip

Pore fluid pressure in a fault zone can be altered by natural processes (e.g., mineral dehydration and thermal pressurization) and industrial operations involving subsurface fluid injection and extraction for the development of energy and water resources. However, the effect of pore pressure change on the stability and slip motion of a preexisting geologic fault remains poorly understood; yet, it is critical for the assessment of seismic hazard. In this study, we develop a micromechanical model to investigate the effect of pore pressure on fault slip behavior. The model couples fluid flow on the network of pores with mechanical deformation of the skeleton of solid grains. Pore fluid exerts pressure force onto the grains, the motion of which is solved using the discrete element method. We conceptualize the fault zone as a gouge layer sandwiched between two blocks. We study fault stability in the presence of a pressure discontinuity across the gouge layer and compare it with the case of continuous (homogeneous) pore pressure.We focus on the onset of shear failure in the gouge layer and reproduce conditions where the failure plane is parallel to the fault. We show that when the pressure is discontinuous across the fault, the onset of slip occurs on the side with the higher pore pressure, and that this onset is controlled by the maximum pressure on both sides of the fault. In conclusion, the results shed new light on the use of the effective stress principle and the Coulomb failure criterion in evaluating the stability of a complex fault zone.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS2012

On Identifiability of Bias-Type Actuator-Sensor Faults in Multiple-Model-Based Fault Detection and Identification

This paper explores a class of multiple-model-based fault detection and identification (FDI) methods for bias-type faults in actuators and sensors. These methods employ banks of Kalman-Bucy filters to detect the faults, determine the fault pattern, and estimate the fault values, wherein each Kalman-Bucy filter is tuned to a different failure pattern. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for identifiability of actuator faults, sensor faults, and simultaneous actuator and sensor faults. It is shown that FDI of simultaneous actuator and sensor faults is not possible using these methods when all sensors have biases.

Joshi, Suresh M.↗