In-situ X-ray micro-CT quantitative analysis and modelling the damage evolution in granite rock

Abstract

Micro-cracking of rock is important mechanism in underground engineering and subsurface energy extraction. Understanding and modeling microcrack evolution and coalescence, and the eventual macroscopic fracture propagation is still a challenge. A micro-mechanically motivated fracture model is developed based on observation and quantitative analysis of in-situ X-CT uniaxial compression test on brittle intact rock with the resolution of 11.98 μm. We performed uniaxial compression test on a micro-granite and acquired real-time X-CT images of crack development under different loadings to investigate cracking pattern, evolution of the crack network and geometric characteristics of the cracks. The experimental results show that the nucleation of isolated microcracks is the main damage pattern before failure. The evolution of damage is subtle under moderate loading but grows stably in density until the unstable coalescence of microcracks, followed by macro-scale failure. Moreover, the damage process is initially dominated by the development of inclined cracks; when failure is approached, the development of relatively more parallel cracks gradually become predominant, indicating the damage transition nature from shear mechanism to tensile mechanism. Based on the X-CT analysis, an improved physics-informed micro-mechanical sliding model is proposed. Compared with previous sliding models, the crack-crack interaction is improved so that this model can well characterize the abrupt failure process. The total surface area of cracks is used to quantify the damage evolution and a relative calibration method is presented. The simulation results show the stress–strain curve and damage evolution are consistent with the experimental results.