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Fault’s hydraulic diffusivity enhancement during injection induced fault reactivation: application of pore pressure diffusion inversions to laboratory injection experiments

In situ observations of fluid induced fault slip reactivation, as well as the analysis of induced seismicity have demonstrated the complexity of fluid–fault interactions under geological conditions. If fluid flow commonly reactivates faults in the form of aseismic slip or earthquakes, the resulting shear deformation causes strong modifications of the hydraulic properties. In this context, the relationship between slip front and fluid front on deep faults remains not fully understood. In this study, we investigate shear induced fluid flow and hydraulic diffusivity enhancement during fracture shearing in the laboratory. We use a series of injection reactivation tests, conducted under triaxial conditions, at different confining pressures (30, 60 and 95 MPa). The evolution of the fluid pressure along the saw-cut Andesite rock sample was monitored by two pressure sensors, at two opposite locations of the experimental fault. We estimate the history of the effective hydraulic diffusivity (and its associated uncertainties) governing the experimental fault, using the pressure history at two points on the fault. For this, we develop a deterministic and a probabilistic inversion procedure, which is able to reproduce the experimental data for a wide time range of the different experiments. In this study, the hydraulic diffusivity increases by one order of magnitude through the injection experiment. Hydraulic diffusivity changes are mainly governed by the reduction of the effective normal stress acting on the fault plane, with a second-order effect of the shear slip.