CHEN , Junchao

International audience

The majority of experimental rock fatigue tests have been conducted with the continuous cyclic loading path. In this paper we report the results from the fatigue tests of salt with discontinues cyclic loading path containing zero loading stress intervals (ZLIs) of different duration. We show that the application of such intervals strongly...

Natural discontinuities (eg, joints, faults, and bedding planes) are generated through long-term geological processes. The mechanical response of rock mass is known to be greatly impacted by these discontinuities. The existence of these discontinuities has been the principal obstacle to estimate precisely the deformability and stability of rock...

Fracture process is investigated using finite-difference simulations with a new constitutive model. It is shown that both geometry and fracture mechanism itself depend on the preexisting heterogeneities that are stress concentrators. In the brittle regime (low pressure, P), Mode-I fractures propagate normal to the least stress σ3 from the...