Effects of loading conditions on strength and deformability of fractured rocks - a numerical study

This paper presents a systematic numerical study to evaluate the effects of two different loading conditions, namely the axial stress and axial velocity, on testing compressive strength and deformability properties of fractured rocks. The UDEC code was used to perform a series of numerical tests on two-dimensional fracture network (DFN) models, in the similar ways for the uniaxial and biaxial laboratory testing on intact rock samples. The obtained stresses and strains from these numerical experiments were used to estimate equivalent directional Young's modulus and fit the Mohr-Coulomb and Hoek-Brown failure criteria, represented by equivalent material properties defining these two criteria. The numerical results show that stress-strain behaviors changes by loading conditions with higher averaged axial stress under axial velocity condition than that under axial stress condition. Therefore, the effects of different loading conditions should be carefully considered for designing and interpretation of results for in-situ experiments with large volumes of fractured rocks.