Progressive fracture processes around tunnel triggered by blast disturbances under biaxial compression with different lateral pressure coefficients

Abstract

To investigate the progressive fracture processes around a tunnel triggered by static stress and dynamic disturbance, experiments and numerical simulations were performed. The results show that the spatial distributions of acoustic emission (AE) events become very different as lateral pressure coefficients change. The combined effect of static stress and dynamic disturbance causes the damage around the tunnel, and initial stress conditions control the damage morphology. The blast disturbance cannot fundamentally change the damaged area but will deepen the extent of damage and accelerate the failure speed. The more significant the difference between the vertical and horizontal stresses is, the higher the impact on the tunnel by the dynamic disturbance is. The AE activity recovers to a relatively stable state within a short time after the blast and conforms to power-law characteristics.