Experimental and Analytical Investigations of the Effect of Hole Size on Borehole Breakout Geometries for Estimation of In Situ Stresses

Borehole breakout is a natural phenomenon in boreholes drilled in rock due to the induced stress concentration. Many researchers have attempted to correlate this phenomenon with in situ stress magnitudes. In this paper, a series of true triaxial tests on sandstone blocks (120 × 120 × 120 mm3) with different diameter pre-drilled holes have been carried out. Results confirmed that breakout geometries (angular span and depth) are dependent on the relative stress magnitudes. It is also noticed that a larger hole size (hole radius) yielded a wider angular span and deeper normalised depth (breakout depth/hole size), which indicates that hole size is an important parameter for breakout geometries. In addition, the analysis on previous experimental studies suggested that the relationship between two breakout geometries is not unique and is heavily influenced by the horizontal stress magnitudes. The analysis of the existing model also revealed the angular span may be narrowed with increasing horizontal stress ratio under a certain stress–strength condition. Both analyses indicate the breakout geometries are not only dependent on each other but also on the horizontal stress magnitudes. This leads to a tentative conclusion that breakout geometries may not be redundant factors and might be used for horizontal stress estimation.