Data accompanying the paper entitled "Rapid normal stress oscillations cause dilatation and weakening in gouge-bearing faults"

In some scenarios, faults in the crust are withstanding rapid stress changes of different magnitudes, such as those from nearby or remote earthquakes, seasonal impoundment and discharge of reservoirs, and hydrocarbon and geothermal energy production. The impact of such stress changes on the earthquake potential of a fault is poorly understood. Researchers from the Utrecht University and the Delft University of Technology have explored this effect by conducting laboratory experiments on simulated faults under in-situ fault conditions. They employed the high-temperature-pressure ring-shear friction apparatus installed in the HPT lab of the Utrecht University. During the experiments, different modes of perturbations were applied to the simulated fault, including normal stress steps (NSS), pulses (NSP), and oscillations (NSO), while shearing the fault at velocity of 1 μm/s. They measured different quantities with high sampling rates such as shear stress and the axial displacement. The enclosed datasets consist of the raw data from five individual experiments (u572, u573, u574, u828, and u829). In two experiments (u572 and u573), a few segments of particular interests are extracted for detailed analyses.