This award will provide half the funds necessary to upgrade the rock mechanics laboratory at St. Louis University. The additional funding to make this possible has been committed by St. Louis University. This will be an upgrade of equipment borrowed from Texas A&M on a long term,renewable loan. The upgrade will involve the building of apparatus especially designed by the PI to carry out experiments of special interest to scientists studying the behavior of materials in fault zones. The proposed upgrade involves construction of a computerized data acquisition and servo- controlled system,a flow- through pore fluid system,a simplified sealing and sample assembly,and a furnace and controller to achieve elevated temperatures. Upgrade of the rock deformation apparatus and laboratory will allow the development of a research program that will involve graduate students and other researchers interested in the frictional and brittle behavior of rock in fault zones under conditions that favor soluttion transfer and cataclastic mechanisms.
