Numerical tests on thermal cracking characteristics of rocks with different scales

Abstract

Realistic failure process analysis, a thermal software simulation, was used to explore the scale effect of thermal cracking of rock under the thermal–mechanical coupling loading. The patterns and characteristics of thermal destruction were analyzed by simulating the thermal cracking of rocks with the same diameter different lengths, the same length but different diameters, and the same size ratio but different sizes (same length/diameter ratio but with different diameters). The acoustic emission and energy changes were also studied during thermal destruction. The results represented that the main forms of thermal cracking are tensile failure and shear failure. The smaller the scale is (length, diameter, and size), the more complex the pattern of thermal damage exhibited as failure patterns of inverted “S” or “V.” With the increasing scale, thermal damage models were simpler. The elastic modulus was determined by the diameter of specimens, and the peak stress was determined by the length of specimens. Overall, as the scale increased, the stress intensity decreased, but the number of acoustic emissions and acoustic emission energy and the corresponding accumulation increased.