We consider the interaction between a saturated clay buffer layer and a fractured crystalline rock engineered disturbed zone. Once saturated, the clay extrudes into the available rock fractures, behaving as a compressible nonNewtonian fluid. We discuss the modelling implications of published experiments carried out in Sweden and more recently in Japan. Extrusion is halted either when the advanc...

Water chemical analysis of 100 springs from the Orco and the Tinée valleys (Western Italy and Southern France) and a 7 year groundwater chemistry monitoring of the 5 main springs were performed. All these springs drain from crystalline rock slopes. Some of these drain from currently active gravitational slope deformations. All groundwaters flowing through presently unstable slopes show anomalie...

A carefully engineered stimulation that makes use of opening mode fractures is an effective way to reduce injection and production impedance and provide better access for the fluid to enter and promote shearing in the main reservoir volume. We present results from field experiments that mapped the fracture geometry for opening mode hydraulic fractures formed in naturally fractured crystalline r...

Granite is a typical crystalline material, often used as a building material, but also a candidate host rock for the repository of high-level radioactive waste. The petrographic texture-including mineral constituents, grain shape, size, and distribution-controls the fracture initiation, propagation, and coalescence within granitic rocks. In this paper, experimental laboratory tests and numerica...

Investigations over two major tectonic zones in the Hallandsås Horst, Southern Sweden were carried out in connection with a railway tunnelling project. A combination of resistivity imaging, core drilling and geophysical logging was found to provide a good overview of the variation in rock quality and detailed information on the engineering geological characteristics and genesis of the strata. R...

Phosphate-rock or more precisely the phosphorites form the repository of phosphate supply for the fertilizer industry for manufacture of elemental phosphorus, phosphoric acid and innumerable alkali phosphates. It has now been universally agreed that phosphorites have some kind of sedimentary marine origin, the source of phosphorous being of organic and/or inorganic origin (1). The principal pho...

QPA (Quantitative Phase Analysis) of carbonate rocks bearing calcite and dolomite using X-ray diffractometry (XRD) can be performed using the combined Rietveld Structure Refinement (RSR) and semiquantitative Reference Intensity Ratio (RIR) methods, providing an estimation of crystalline phase in a mixture. Different ratios of five samples were prepared by mixing these crystal minerals with high...

Translation from physics: ‘Glass’: a material which is hard and inflexible (like a solid) but is not completely ordered or lattice-like in its microscropic structure (thus, unlike a crystal or simple metals). ‘Spin’: pertaining to the magnetic spins of ions in a material. ‘Spin glass’: a material, effectively solid, which contains some irregular distribution of magnetizable ions. Basic laborato...

We present the structural and surface characterization of the alloy formation of scandium gallium nitride ScxGa1-xN(001)/MgO(001) grown by radio-frequency molecular beam epitaxy over the Sc range of x = 0-100%. In-plane diffraction measurements show a clear face-centered cubic surface structure with single-crystalline epitaxial type of growth mode for all x; a diffuse/distinct transition in the...