Abstract
Freezing thawing cycles are known to play an important role in fracture propagation on rock mass and thus in rock slope instabilities. In laboratories, this phenomenon can be studied through the measurement of the velocities of elastic waves. Seven types of rocks differing by their mineralogy and texture were tested (gneiss, basalt, amphibolite, dolomite, sandstone, marble limestone and calcite). Five samples of each rock were tested. All samples were submitted to freezing/thawing cycles following the European Standard describing the tests to determine the frost resistance of natural stone. Elastic waves were recorded on the samples every 14 cycles. The experimentation continued until the rock was macrofissurated. The evolution of the weight of the samples, the velocities of elastic waves, the evolution of the shapes of the waves were recorded to characterize changes over freeze-thaw cycles. In addition, signal processing on the waves allows to compute energy variations as well as the evolution of natural frequencies of the samples.
Highlights
Freezing thawing (FT) cycles are supposed to play a role in fracture propagation on rock mass, and in rock slope instabilities [1]
They showed that when FT cycles increase, UCS decreases and, considering a Mohr–Coulomb criterion, the cohesive force decreases whereas the friction angle remains constant with the increase of FT cycles
Seven types of saturated rocks were subjected to freeze-thaw cycles
Summary
Freezing thawing (FT) cycles are supposed to play a role in fracture propagation on rock mass, and in rock slope instabilities [1]. [8] for instance focused on 2 sandstones, a fine and a coarse sandstone They showed that under freeze-thaw cycling, both rocks present the same evolution. When the number of FT cycles increase, the porosity of the two sandstones increases, with a good linear fit. [9] studied P-wave velocity changes in freezing hard low-porosity rocks but without imposing cycles. They tested 20 alpine and 2 artic rock specimens sampled from several permafrost sites and proposed a time-average model based on their laboratory experiments
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