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Which brittleness index?

December 03, 2013/ Matt Hall


A few weeks ago I looked at the concept or concepts of brittleness.
There turned out to be lots of ways of looking at it. We decided to call it a
rock behaviour rather than a property. And we determined to look more
closely at some different ways to define it. Here they are...

Some brittleness indices


There are lots of 'definitions' of brittleness in the literature. Several of
them capture the relationship between compressive and tensile
strength, C and T respectively. This is potentially useful, because we
measure uniaxial compressive strength in the standard triaxial rig tests
that have become routine in shale studies... but we don't usually find the
tensile strength, because it's much harder to measure. This is unfortunate,
because hydraulic fracturing is initially a tensile failure (though
reactivation and other failure modes do occur see Williams-Stroud et al.
2012).
Altindag (2003) gave the following three examples of different brittleness
indices. In turn, they are the strength ratio, a sort of relative strength
contrast, and the mean strength (his favourite):

This is just the start, once you start digging, you'll find lots of others. Like
Hucka & Das's (1974) round-up I wrote about last time, one thing they
have in common is that they capture some characteristic of rock failure.
That is, they do not rely on implicit rock properties.
Another point to note. Baant & Kazemi (1990) gave a way to de-scale
empirical brittleness measures to account for sample size not
surprisingly, this sort of 'real world adjustment' starts to make things quite
complicated. Not so linear after all.

What not to do
The prevailing view among many interpreters is that brittleness is
proportional to Young's modulus and/or Poisson's ratio, and/or a linear
combination of these. We've reported a couple of times on what Lev
Vernik (Marathon) thinks of the prevailing view: we need to question our
assumptions about isotropy and linear strain, and computing shale
brittleness from elastic properties is not physically meaningful. For one
thing, you'll note that elastic moduli don't have anything to do with rock
failure.
The YoungPoisson brittleness myth started with Rickman et al. 2008, SPE
115258, who presented a rather ugly representation of a linear
relationship (I gather this is how petrophysicists like to write equations).
You can see the tightness of the relationship for yourself in the data.

If I understand the notation, this is the same as writing B = 7.14E


200 + 72.9, where E is (static) Young's modulus and is (static) Poisson's
ratio. It's an empirical relationship, based on the data shown, and is
perhaps useful in the Barnett (or wherever the data are from, we aren't
told). But, as with any kind of inversion, the onus is on you to check the
quality of the calibration in your rocks.

What's left?
Here's Altindag (2003) again:
Brittleness, defined differently from author to author, is an important
mechanical property of rocks, but there is no universally accepted
brittleness concept or measurement method...

This leaves us free to worry less about brittleness, whatever it is, and
focus on things we really care about, like organic matter content or
frackability (not unrelated). The thing is to collect good data, examine it
carefully with proper tools (Spotfire,Tableau, R, Python...) and find
relationships you can use, and prove, in your rocks.
References

Altindag, R (2003). Correlation of specific energy with rock brittleness concepts on rock
cutting. The Journal of The South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. April 2003, p
163ff. Available online.

Hucka V, B Das (1974). Brittleness determination of rocks by different methods. Int J Rock
Mech Min Sci Geomech Abstr 10 (11), 38992. DOI:10.1016/0148-9062(74)91109-7.

Rickman, R, M Mullen, E Petre, B Grieser, and D Kundert (2008). A practical use of shale
petrophysics for stimulation design optimization: all shale plays are not clones of the Barnett
Shale. SPE 115258, DOI: 10.2118/115258-MS.

Williams-Stroud, S, W Barker, and K Smith (2012). Induced hydraulic fractures or reactivated


natural fractures? Modeling the response of natural fracture networks to stimulation
treatments. American Rock Mechanics Association 12667. Available online.

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