Finite element simulation of crack initiation and propagation in rocks

Rock under natural conditions experiences different stress environment and it fails when it crosses its threshold value. Understanding their failure will not lead to determine the strength and deformational characteristics but also will be useful for safe and economic design of structures which are built in rock. To know their mechanism of failure many failure theories have been developed and some of them most commonly used were Mohr-Coulomb and Griffith theories which are found to be applicable for rock. Based on these theories many researchers have done experiments to verify those failure mechanisms when it is been subjected to different stress condition and later extended with some other conditions which influence their behavior in failure. But even though some researchers have found these theories and experiments does not fully capture the complete mechanism of failure and they have their advantages and limitations especially when rock having discontinuities like cracks, joints, flaws, plane of weakness etc present in it. And by considering their limitations recent decades researchers have adopted numerical tool like finite element, finite difference methods to overcome these limitations. The present study focuses on the numerical verification of recently developed failure criterion and implementing it Finite element softwareABAQUS to understand their failure mechanism when subjected to uniaxial loading conditions how their existing crack will gets initiated and propagated further ends with failure. © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, London.