oa Numerical Simulation of Dynamic Fracturing Using a Particle Method

Better understanding of failure mechanism of rocks benefits in many fields from rock engineering to earth sciences. Especially, it is essential to understand how fractures initiate and propagate under various loading conditions in order to clarify real rock fracture processes. For the interpretation of rock failure, many attempts have been made experimentally or using fracture mechanics theory. Although much of the knowledge available today is based on experimental observations and the theory successfully represented the propagation of predefined cracks, the failure mechanics are not fully understood by experimental results and it is difficult to describe the initiation and coalescence of cracks using the theory. Thus, in the recent years, numerical modeling, which may be less restrictive, has been applied to study crack behaviors, and we also approach to the rock failure based on numerical simulations. To represent rock failure, we use a Hamiltonian Particle method (HPM), one of particle methods. In the HPM, we do not need to use grids or meshes to discretize the rock model, and thus we could deal with the failure relatively easily. In spite of this advantage of the HPM, the applicability of the method to the failure phenomena have yet to be revealed fully. In the present study, we apply the HPM to rock failure under some different specimens and different loading conditions. As a result of our simulations, the HPM successfully reproduce failure pattern of brittle fracture observed rock fracture experiments and can observe micro cracks initiation and propagation. This suggests that the HPM is the useful tool to analyze rock failure.