Effect law of Damage Characteristics of Rock Similar Material with Pre-Existing Cracks

In order to further study the failure mechanism for rock similar materials, this study established the damage model based on accumulative AE events, investigated the damage characteristics for rock similar material samples with pre-existing cracks of varying width under uniaxial compression load. The equipment used in this study is the self-developed YYW-II strain controlled unconfined compression apparatus and the PCIE-8 acoustic emission (AE) monitoring system. The influences of the width of the pre-existing cracks to the damage characteristics of rock similar materials are analyzed. Results show that, (1) the damage model can better describe the damage characteristics of rock similar materials; (2) the tested samples have three stages during failure: initial damage stage, stable development of damage stage, and accelerated development of damage stage; (3) with the width of pre-existing cracks vary from 3mm to 5mm, the damage of rock similar materials increases gradually. The outcomes of this study provided additional values to the research of the failure mechanism for geotechnical similar material models. (paper)