Experimental study on rock damage and failure induced by multi-source dynamic disturbances

Abstract

Research into the mechanical behaviour of rock surrounding the deep-buried tunnel under multi-source dynamic disturbance is key to the safety of underground engineering operations. Based on a dynamic true-triaxial testing apparatus, the present study examined the mechanical behaviours and fracture mechanisms of deep granite under the coupled effects of intermediate-frequency dynamic disturbance (f = 300 Hz) and low-frequency dynamic disturbance (f = 5-20 Hz). Intermediate-frequency dynamic disturbance markedly initiates the genesis of tensile micro-cracks within rock, while low-frequency dynamic disturbance exacerbates the propagation and interconnection of cracks, ultimately leading to the formation of a tensile-shear mixed failure mode. The severity of the influence of intermediate-frequency disturbance on the peak strength of rock is the initial crack compaction σ_cc (decreased by 8.1%), the damage stress σ_cd (decreased by 6.4%), and the crack initiation stress σ_ci (decreased by 4.7%) under different disturbance timings. This changes the characteristic stress of the rock and significantly decreases its brittleness index. Meanwhile, the low-frequency f of weak disturbance significantly affects the failure mode and peak strength of the rock. The peak strength σ_p exhibits U-shaped variation, with the maximum decrease reaching 15 MPa, which indicates the presence of a resonance effect between the external disturbance and the natural frequency of the rock. The timing of intermediate-frequency disturbance alters the natural frequency of the rock. Analysis of the fracture surface shows that cracks induced by intermediate-frequency disturbance primarily propagate along the σ₁-direction, while low-frequency disturbance promotes propagation of shearing cracks along the σ₃-direction. Brittle failure occurs due to the through-going shearing cracks. The results further reveal the synergistic mechanism of action of multi-source dynamic disturbance on rock failure, indicating that the coupled effects of multi-source dynamic disturbances significantly increase the risk of brittle failure in the rock mass.

Keywords

True-triaxial compression / Dynamic disturbance / Tensile-shear failure / Characteristic stress / Resonance effect

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Han-Yi Liu: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Ben-Guo He: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Jia-Hua Guan: Validation, Software. Hong-Yuan Fu: Visualization.

Declaration of competing interest

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.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFB2603602) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52222810 and 52178383).

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