Rotary Shear Experiments on Glass Bead Aggregates

Constant sliding velocity (i.e. rate of rotation) friction experiments on mm-thick layers of glass beads, under room temperature and humidity conditions. Stick-slip in sheared granular aggregates is considered to be an analog for the intermittent deformation of the earth’s lithosphere via earthquakes. Stick-slip can be regular, i.e. periodic and of consistent amplitude, or irregular, i.e. aperiodic and of varying amplitude. In the context of seismology, the former behavior resembles the Characteristic Earthquake Model, whereas the latter is equivalent to the Gutenberg-Richter Model. This publication contains mechanical and acoustic emission (AE) data from sliding experiments on aggregates of soda-lime glass beads. By tuning certain parameters of the experiment, our system is able to produce either regular or irregular stick-slip. Mechanical data, namely forces (axial and lateral) and displacements (ditto), have been sampled in continuous mode (also known as “streaming mode” or “First In, First Out; FIFO”), whereas AE waveforms have been sampled in block mode (also known as “trigger mode”). A single, multichannel data acquisition system was used to acquire all of the data, ensuring a common time base. The experiments have been performed under normal stress values of 4 or 8 MPa and the samples have been sheared to large displacements; many times larger than their initial thickness of approximately 4.5 mm. Therefore, this data set fills a gap between most experiments reported in the physics literature (low normal stress and large shear displacement) and the geoscience literature (high normal stress and small shear displacement). The data is provided in 12 subfolders for 12 experiments/samples. Detailed information about the files in these subfolders as well as information on how the data is processed is given in the explanatory file Korkolis_et_al_2021_Data_Description.docx. Contact person is Evangelos Korkolis - Researcher - ekorko@gmail.com · There is a new version of this dataset been published, which can be found here; https://public.yoda.uu.nl/geo/UU01/HPZZ2M.htm