Compressive Fracture of Brittle Geomaterial: Fractal Features of Compression-Induced Fracture Surfaces and Failure Mechanism

Compressive fracture is one of the most common failure patterns in geotechnical engineering. For better understanding of the local failure mechanism of compressive fractures of brittle geomaterials, three compressive fracture tests were conducted on sandstone. Edge cracked semicircular bend specimens were used and, consequently, fresh and unfilled compressive fracture surfaces were obtained. A laser profilometer was employed to measure the topography of each rough fracture surface, followed by fractal analysis of the irregularities of the obtained compression-induced fracture surfaces using the cubic cover method. To carry out a contrastive analysis with the results of compressive fracture tests, three tension mode fracture tests were also conducted and the fractal features of the obtained fracture surfaces were determined. The obtained average result of the fractal dimensions of the compression-induced surfaces was 2.070, whereas the average result was 2.067 for the tension-induced fracture surfaces. No remarkable differences between the fractal dimensions of the compression-induced and tension-induced fracture surfaces may indicate that compressive fracture may occur, at least on the investigative scale of this work, in a similar manner to tension fracture.