Strength, Deformability and X-ray Micro-CT Observations of Deeply Buried Marble Under Different Confining Pressures

In this research, a series of triaxial compression experiments and X-ray observations were conducted to explore the strength, deformability and internal damage mechanism of deeply buried marble. The results show that an increase in confining pressure results in obvious brittle–ductile transition characteristics of deeply buried marble. The Young’s modulus of the marble increased nonlinearly with increasing confining pressure. The peak and residual strength of the marble exhibit a clear linear relationship with the confining pressure, which can be described by the linear Mohr–Coulomb criterion. The sensitivity of the residual strength on the confining pressure was clearly higher than that of the peak strength. After uniaxial and triaxial compression failure, marble specimens were analyzed using a three-dimensional X-ray micro-CT scanning system. Based on horizontal and vertical cross-sections, the marble specimen is mainly dominated by axial splitting tensile cracks under uniaxial compression, but under confining pressure, the marble specimen is mainly dominated by a single shear crack. To quantitatively evaluate the internal damage of the marble material, the crack area and aperture extent for each horizontal cross-section were calculated by analyzing the binarized pictures. The system of crack planes under uniaxial compression is more complicated than that under triaxial compression, which is also supported by the evolution of the crack area and aperture extent. Finally, the brittle–ductile transition mechanism of the marble is discussed and interpreted according to the proposed conceptual models.