Typical phases of pre-failure damage in granitic rocks under differential compression

Abstract

Abstract The evolution of pre-failure damage in brittle rock samples subjected to differential compression has been investigated by means of acoustic emission (AE) records. The experimental results show that the damaging process is characterized by three typical phases of microcracking activity: primary, secondary, and nucleation. The primary phase reflects the initial activity of pre-existing microcracks, and is characterized by an increase, with increasing stress, both in event rate and b value. The secondary phase involves subcritical growth of the microcrack population, revealed by an event rate increase and a dramatic decrease of the b value. The nucleation phase corresponds to initiation and accelerated growth of the ultimate macroscopic fracture along one or more incipient fracture planes. During the nucleation phase, the b value decreases rapidly to the global minimum value around 0.5. The temporal variation of b in every phase clearly correlates with grain size of the test sample, hence indicating that a comparatively larger grain size results in a lower b value. In order to investigate the fracture mechanism of each phase, a damage model was tested by employing the constitutive laws of subcritical crack growth of crack populations with a fractal size distribution.