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Microscopic damage evolution of anisotropic rocks under indirect tensile conditions: Insights from acoustic emission and digital image correlation techniques

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Abstract

The anisotropy induced by rock bedding structures is usually manifested in the mechanical behaviors and failure modes of rocks. Brazilian tests are conducted for seven groups of shale specimens featuring different bedding angles. Acoustic emission (AE) and digital image correlation (DIC) technologies are used to monitor the in-situ failure of the specimens. Furthermore, the crack morphology of damaged samples is observed through scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Results reveal the structural dependence on the tensile mechanical behavior of shales. The shale disk exhibits compression in the early stage of the experiment with varying locations and durations. The location of the compression area moves downward and gradually disappears when the bedding angle increases. The macroscopic failure is well characterized by AE event location results, and the dominant frequency distribution is related to the bedding angle. The b-value is found to be stress-dependent. The crack turning angle between layers and the number of cracks crossing the bedding both increase with the bedding angle, indicating competition between crack propagations. SEM results revealed that the failure modes of the samples can be classified into three types: tensile failure along beddings with shear failure of the matrix, ladder shear failure along beddings with tensile failure of the matrix, and shear failure along multiple beddings with tensile failure of the matrix.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks for the help from Dr. Yusong Zhao. This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51934003) and the Major Science and Technology Special Project of Yunnan Province, China (Nos. 202102AF080001 and 202102AG050024).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Resource Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Chaoqun Chu, Shunchuan Wu & Chaojun Zhang

  2. Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 1A4, Canada

    Chaoqun Chu

  3. Faculty of Land Resources Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunmiing, 650093, China

    Shunchuan Wu

  4. China Railway Sixth Group Limited Company, Beijing, 100036, China

    Yongle Zhang

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Correspondence to Shunchuan Wu.

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Shunchuan Wu is the editorial board member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Chu, C., Wu, S., Zhang, C. et al. Microscopic damage evolution of anisotropic rocks under indirect tensile conditions: Insights from acoustic emission and digital image correlation techniques. Int J Miner Metall Mater 30, 1680–1691 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12613-023-2649-y

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