M. Davood Yavari; H. Haeri; V. Sarfarazi; M. Fatehi Marji; H. A. Lazemi
Abstract
The propagation mechanism of cracks emanating from two holes within the concrete specimens is studied by considering the effects of different lateral compressive stresses. The experimental part of this research work is carried out on some specially prepared pre-cracked specimens with two neighbouring ...
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The propagation mechanism of cracks emanating from two holes within the concrete specimens is studied by considering the effects of different lateral compressive stresses. The experimental part of this research work is carried out on some specially prepared pre-cracked specimens with two neighbouring holes under only a uniaxial compression in the laboratory. The numerical modeling part is performed under both the uniaxial compresion and the lateral confinment by the 2D particle flow code (PFC2D). It is shown that the lateral confinement may change the path of crack propagation in a specimen compared to that of the uniaxially-loaded one. Various senarios of the mixed mode radial crack propagation around the holes are obtained, and both the wing (induced tensile) cracks and secondary (shear) cracks are produced and propagated in various paths due to a change in the confining pressure. The fracturing pattern changes from a single tensile crack to that of the several shear bands by increasing the confining pressure. Also the number of shear cracks is increased by increasing the lateral confinement.On the other hand, as the confining pressure increases, the wing cracks start their growth from the walls and reach the center of the cracks under high confinements.
M. Nikkhah
Abstract
Nowadays acoustic emission (AE) testing based on the Kaiser Effect (KE) is increasingly used to estimate the in-situ stress in laboratories. In this work, this effect is assessed on cylindrical specimens in numerical simulations of the cyclic loadings including loading, unloading, and re-loading cycles ...
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Nowadays acoustic emission (AE) testing based on the Kaiser Effect (KE) is increasingly used to estimate the in-situ stress in laboratories. In this work, this effect is assessed on cylindrical specimens in numerical simulations of the cyclic loadings including loading, unloading, and re-loading cycles using a 3D code called the particle flow code (PFC) based upon the distinct element method. To achieve this objective, at first, the numerical model is calibrated using a laboratory test performed on the selected sandstone specimens. The results obtained show that PFC and the distinct element code are useful tools used to investigate the damage and KE of a brittle rock. Also the results obtained by the triaxial modeling show that a combination of triaxial loading stresses change the results of uniaxial loading. Further, KE is influenced under confining stresses so that larger confining stresses lead to greater differences between the KE stress during the uniaxial and pre-stress loadings.
