Weakening Investigation of Reservoir Rock by Coupled Uniaxial Compression, Computed Tomography and Digital Image Correlation Methods: A Case Study

Cyclic wetting and drying treatment is commonly used to accelerate the weakening process of reservoir rock. The weakening is reflected in strength variation and structure variation, while the latter receives less attention. Based on a series of cyclic wetting and drying tests, this study tentatively applied the uniaxial compressive test, computed tomography (CT) test and digital image correlation (DIC) test to investigate the weakening of slate in a reservoir area. Test results show that the weakening is mainly reflected in the reduction of compressive strength, followed by the decrease of ability to resist cracking and elastic deformation. The weakening seems more likely to be caused by structure variation rather than composition change. Two failure modes, e.g., splitting and splitting-tension, are concluded based on the crack paths: the splitting failure mode occurs in the highly weathered samples and the splitting-tension failure mode appears in the low-weathered samples. The transition zones of deformation are inside samples. The nephogram maps quantify the continuous deformation and correspond to the aforementioned structure variation process. This study offers comprehensive methods to the weakening investigation of slate in reservoir area and may provide qualitative reference in the stability evaluation of related slate rock slope.