Disturbance shear fracturing process and failure precursors of intermittent structural planes with different connectivity under true triaxial condition

Abstract

The mechanisms, processes, and precursors of shear failure in rock structural planes under three-dimensional geostress and excavation disturbances are unclear, which poses challenges for disaster prediction and warning in underground rock engineering. Therefore, this study self-developed a new separation rolling-sliding shear device for rock structural plane under true triaxial condition, and proposed a true triaxial shear testing method to simulate the damage of rock structural plane induced by the three-dimensional geostress redistribution during engineering excavation and subsequent dynamic disturbance further triggering failure. True triaxial disturbance shear tests were conducted on intermittent structural planes with different connectivity. With connectivity increasing, disturbance shear strength and failure surface roughness of structural planes gradually decreases. An improved simplex acoustic emission spatial localization method was proposed to reveal disturbance shear fracturing evolution. During disturbance shear fracturing process, micro-tensile cracks dominate, and the proportion of micro-shear cracks continues to increase, showing a mixed tensile-shear fracture mechanism. Approaching to disturbance shear failure, the acoustic emission fractal dimension decreases rapidly then increases to the maximum value, the b-value decreases rapidly to less than 1, the rapid increase in LgN/b exceeds 3, and the low-frequency and high-amplitude dense fracture signal appears abundantly, which can be used as disturbance failure precursors of intermittent structural planes.