A Stochastic Bulk Damage Model Based on Mohr-Coulomb Failure Criterion for Dynamic Rock Fracture

Abstract

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.