Damage evolution and constitutive model of limestone with horizontal fissure under the coupled effects of dry-wet cycling and precompression stress

Abstract

To reveal the influence of coupled effects of dry-wet cycling and precompression stress (CEDWCPS) on the damage evolution of limestone with horizontal fissure (LHF), a series of degradation and uniaxial compression tests were conducted, and a corresponding piecewise damage constitutive model (PDCM) was established. We found that both dry-wet cycling and precompression stress deteriorate the physical properties, alter the microscopic characteristics, and reduce the mechanical properties of the LHF. These degradations are particularly pronounced under the CEDWCPS, although the magnitude of these changes gradually diminishes with the progression of dry-wet cycling. Meanwhile, they also reduce the deformation degree, prolong the micropore compaction stage, shorten the unstable crack propagation stage, lower the frequency and intensity of AE events, decrease the high-amplitude and high-frequency AE signals, enlarge crack scales, and shorten the crack initiation time. Among the changes of these indicators, the dry-wet cycling plays a dominant role. The crack types of LHF under the CEDWCPS (LHFCEDWCPS) are predominantly tensile cracks, supplemented by shear cracks. The failure mode can be defined as tensile-shear composite failure. Finally, the established PDCM effectively captures the nonlinear deformation of micropore and the linear deformation of the matrix in LHFCEDWCPS, with all corresponding R² consistently exceeding 0.97.

Keywords

Dry-wet cycling / Precompression stress / Coupled effect / Fractured limestone / Damage evolution / Damage constitutive model

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Shunbo Zhang: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Valida-tion, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Zhongping Yang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Method-ology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Concep-tualization. Yang Gao: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Miao Liu: Validation, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Shan-meng Hou: Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationsh ips that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Yunnan Province Science and Technology Plan Project (No. 202403AA080001-4), the Key Research and Development Project of Guangxi, China (No. gui-keAB24010144), and the National Key Research and Development Project of China (Nos. 2021YFB3901402 and 2018YFC1504802).

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