SIMULATION AND STUDY ON ORIENTATION OF BORE HOLE BREAKOUT IN INHOMOGENEOUS ROCKS

Abstract

Bore hole breakout is an important method to measure the orientation of earth stress. For inhomogeneous rocks, actual orientation of break out usually deviates from the minimum compressional stress predicted by idealistic elasticity. We use a Weibull distribution to describe the scatter of mechanical property of rocks, and apply the RFPA method to simulate the bore hole breakout in inhomogeneous rocks to study their orientation distribution and possible errors. It is also shown that the RFPA method has broad future of application.