Strainmeter

A strainmeter is an instrument used by geophysicists to measure the deformation of the Earth. Linear strainmeters measure the changes in the distance between two points, using either a solid piece of material (over a short distance) or a laser interferometer (over a long distance, up to several hundred meters). The type using a solid length standard was invented by Benioff in 1932, using an iron pipe; later instruments used rods made of fused quartz. Modern instruments of this type can make measurements of length changes over very small distances, and are commonly placed in boreholes to measure small changes in the diameter of the borehole. Another type of borehole instrument detects changes in a volume filled with fluid (such as silicone oil). The most common type is the dilatometer invented by Sacks and Evertson in the USA (patent 3,635,076); a design that uses specially shaped volumes to measure the strain tensor has been developed by Sakata in Japan.