Fracture initiation and propagation in intact rock – A review

By E. Hoek, C. Derek Martin. 2014

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The initiation and propagation of failure in intact rock are a matter of fundamental importance in rock engineering. At low confining pressures, tensile fracturing initiates in samples at 40%–60% of the uniaxial compressive strength and as loading continues, and these tensile fractures increase in density, ultimately coalescing and leading to strain localization and macro-scale shear failure of the samples. The Griffith theory of brittle failure provides a simplified model and a useful basis for discussion of this process. The Hoek–Brown failure criterion provides an acceptable estimate of the peak strength for shear failure but a cutoff has been added for tensile conditions. However, neither of these criteria adequately explains the progressive coalition of tensile cracks and the final shearing of the specimens at higher confining stresses. Grain-based numerical models, in which the grain size distributions as well as the physical properties of the component grains of the rock are incorporated, have proved to be very useful in studying these more complex fracture processes.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38de9b5727b052dd0eba9652ae01634dec5e1283

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

In Mechanics of Materials

In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Experimental Study on the Growth, Coalescence and Wrapping Behaviors of 3D Cross-Embedded Flaws Under Uniaxial Compression (2018, background): “Such discontinuities in rocks have two effects (Bobet and Einstein 1998; Hoek and Martin 2014; Cao et al. 2015): (1) they decrease the strength and the stiffness of rocks, and (2) they are a source of initiation of new discontinuities, which in turn may grow and coalesce with other flaws and further”