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  1. We present a stochastic bulk damage model for rock fracture. The decomposition of strain or stress tensor to its negative and positive parts is often used to drive damage and evaluate the effective stress tensor. However, they typically fail to correctly model rock fracture in compression. We propose a damage force model based on the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion and an effective stress relation that remedy this problem. An evolution equation specifies the rate at which damage tends to its quasi-static limit. The relaxation time of the model introduces an intrinsic length scale for dynamic fracture and addresses the mesh sensitivity problem of earlier damage models. The ordinary differential form of the damage equation makes this remedy quite simple and enables capturing the loading rate sensitivity of strain-stress response. The asynchronous Spacetime Discontinuous Galerkin (aSDG) method is used for macroscopic simulations. To study the effect of rock inhomogeneity, the Karhunen-Loeve method is used to realize random fields for rock cohesion. It is shown that inhomogeneity greatly differentiates fracture patterns from those of a homogeneous rock, including the location of zones with maximum damage. Moreover, as the correlation length of the random field decreases, fracture patterns resemble angled-cracks observed in compressive rock fracture. 
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  2. The microstructural design has an essential effect on the fracture response of brittle materials. We present a stochastic bulk damage formulation to model dynamic brittle fracture. This model is compared with a similar interfacial model for homogeneous and heterogeneous materials. The damage models are rate-dependent, and the corresponding damage evolution includes delay effects. The delay effect provides mesh objectivity with much less computational efforts. A stochastic field is defined for material cohesion and fracture strength to involve microstructure effects in the proposed formulations. The statistical fields are constructed through the Karhunen-Loeve (KL) method. An advanced asynchronous Spacetime Discontinuous Galerkin (aSDG) method is used to discretize the final system of coupled equations. Application of the presented formulation is shown through dynamic fracture simulation of rock under a uniaxial compressive load. The final results show that a stochastic bulk damage model produces more realistic results in comparison with a homogenizes model.

     
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  3. Fracture patterns experienced under a dynamic uniaxial compressive load are highly sensitive to rock microstructural defects due to its brittleness and the absence of macroscopic stress concentration points. We propose two different approaches for modeling rock microstructural defects and inhomogeneity. In the explicit realization approach, microcracks with certain statistics are incorporated in the computational domain. In the implicit realization approach, fracture strength values are sampled using a Weibull probability distribution. We use the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion to define an effective stress in the context of an interfacial damage model. This model predicts crack propagation at angles ±ɸch = ±(45 − ɸ/2) relative to the direction of compressive load, where ɸ is the friction angle. By using appropriate models for fracture strength anisotropy, we demonstrate the interaction of rock weakest plane and ɸch. Numerical results demonstrate the greater effect of strength anisotropy on fracture pattern when an explicit approach is employed. In addition, the density of fractures increases as the angle of the weakest planes approaches ±ɸch. The fracture simulations are performed by an h-adaptive asynchronous spacetime discontinuous Galerkin (aSDG) method that can accommodate crack propagation in any directions. 
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  4. Realistic fracture simulations in rock as a heterogeneous brittle material with significant inherent randomness require the use of models that incorporate its inhomogeneities and statistical variability. The high dependence of their fracture progress on microstructural defects results in wide scatter in their ultimate strength and the so-called size effect. This paper proposes an approach based on statistical volume elements (SVEs) to characterize rock fracture strength at the mesoscale. The use of SVEs ensures that the material randomness is maintained upon averaging of microscale features. Because the fracture strength varies not just spatially, but also by the angle of loading, this work includes angular variability to properly model a heterogeneous rock domain. Two different microcrack distributions, one angularly uniform and one angularly biased towards a specific angle, are used to show that implementing angle into the random field provides the most realistic fracture simulation. An adaptive asynchronous spacetime discontinuous Galerkin (aSDG) finite element method is used to perform the dynamic fracture simulations. 
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