Abstract
1 IntroductionFracture is a failure mechanism of brittle materials that isof great importance for the performance of structures.Rapid and violent failures of large-scale geotechnical,mining or civil engineering structures cause significantsafety hazards, material damage, and interruption to oreven cessation of mining or building activities. Ability torecognise pre-failure rock mass behaviour may result inpredicting or averting the potential for geotechnical andgeological failures (Szwedzicki 2003). Rock fracturemechanics is one approach to resolve this task.Rock fracture mechanics can be employed not only toimprove safety, but also to enhance the performance andprofitability of rock engineering structures. Examples arethe geological disposal of radioactive waste, terrestrialsequestration of carbon dioxide to ease prejudicial effectson the environment, efficient underground storage of oil,gas or air, enhanced recovery of hydrocarbons, geothermalenergy extraction, and underground constructions atincreasing overburden pressure for infrastructure or trans-port. For these geomechanical applications the stress statesare mostly compressive, therefore, shearing is an importantfailure mechanism in rock materials.The stress and displacement field around a crack tipduring shearing results from the application of uniformshear loadings at infinity. In this so-called Mode II loadingin fracture mechanics, the crack faces slide relative to eachother and displacements of the crack surfaces are in thecrack plane and perpendicular to the crack front. The crackinitiation takes place when the crack tip stress intensityfactor K
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