Experimental Studies on the Changes in Resistivity and Its Anisotropy Using Electrical Resistivity Tomography

Abstract

Three measuring lines were arranged on one of free planes of magnetite cuboid samples. Apparent resistivity data were acquired by MIR-2007 resistivity meter when samples were under uniaxial compression of servocontrol YAW-5000F loadingmachine in laboratory. Then we constructed the residual resistivity images using electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and plotted the diagrams of apparent resistivity anisotropy coefficient (ARAC)λ∗and the included angleαbetween the major axis of apparent resistivity anisotropy ellipse and the axis of load with pressure and effective depth. Our results show that with increasing pressure, resistivity and the decreased (D region) and increased (I region) resistivity regions have complex behaviors, but when pressure is higher than a certain value, the average resistivity decrease and the area of D region expand gradually in all time with the increase of pressure, which may be significant to the monitoring and prediction of earthquake, volcanic activities, and large-scale geologic motions. The effects of pressure onλ∗andαare not very outstanding for dry magnetite samples.