An Experimental Study of Dynamic Tensile Failure of Rocks Subjected to Hydrostatic Confinement

Abstract

It is critical to understand the dynamic tensile failure of confined rocks in many rock engineering applications, such as underground blasting in mining projects. To simulate the in situ stress state of underground rocks, a modified split Hopkinson pressure bar system is utilized to load Brazilian disc (BD) samples hydrostatically, and then exert dynamic load to the sample by impacting the striker on the incident bar. The pulse shaper technique is used to generate a slowly rising stress wave to facilitate the dynamic force balance in the tests. Five groups of Laurentian granite BD samples (with static BD tensile strength of 12.8 MPa) under the hydrostatic confinement of 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MPa were tested with different loading rates. The result shows that the dynamic tensile strength increases with the hydrostatic confining pressure. It is also observed that under the same hydrostatic pressure, the dynamic tensile strength increases with the loading rate, revealing the so-called rate dependency for engineering materials. Furthermore, the increment of the tensile strength decreases with the hydrostatic confinement, which resembles the static tensile behavior of rock under confining pressure, as reported in the literature. The recovered samples are examined using X-ray micro-computed tomography method and the observed crack pattern is consistent with the experimental result.