Investigation of dolomite’ rock brittle fracture using fully calibrated Karagozian Case Concrete model

Abstract

This paper presents a procedure to compute the parameters of the Karagozian and Case Concrete (KCC) constitutive model for brittle materials based on dolomite rock. First, the fracture energy and fracture toughness of the dolomite rock were determined from two experimental tests: the semicircular bending test (SCBT) and Brazilian indirect tension test (BT). Next, the novel optimization-based strategy was developed for efficiently calibrating the brittle damage parameters, and a broad parametric study was performed based on dolomite rock. Finally, the optimal parameters were validated through three experimental tests: SCBT, BT and a drop-weight fragmentation test. The results were compared with those obtained using three different sets of parameters for dolomite rock that is the KCC model with automatically generated parameters, parameters that provides an instable softening behavior, and the KCC model with parameters calibrated by the authors in a previous study. A qualitative and quantitative comparison of the results confirmed that the approach presented here improves the efficiency of fracture reproduction.