Papers by Author: D.A. Liu

Abstract: Multi-crack problems are deeply involved in rock-like material and rock engineering. In order to study the influences of lateral stress and inclined crack angle on the failure load of the multi-cracked body, uniaxial and biaxial compression fracture tests are conducted on plate specimens with regular distributed multi-cracks. The stress distribution and the stress intensity factors KI and KII for every crack tips of the specimens are calculated by FEM. The experiment revealed that the failure load of the multi-cracked specimens increase obviously with the increase of the lateral pressure σ2 and the inclined crack angle α. And the multi-cracked specimens will hardly initiate propagation under equal biaxial compression. Analyses have been shown that these can be explained by the variation of KII with the σ2 and the α.

Abstract: A virtual crack vector model is proposed in this paper to simulate the branched crack propagation and simplify its calculation of energy release rate. An energy gradient fracture criterion is constructed based on this model. It can take account of the effects of biaxial loads or T-stress on brittle mixed mode fracture and agrees well with the test data of biaxial tensile fracture and the specially conducted experiment of the influences of ox on the mixed mode fracture of plexiglas. Considering its advantage of predicting initial propagation angle and critical fracture stress independently without the determination of the core region radius, it can be used as a practical fracture criterion for brittle mixed mode fracture under biaxial tension.