An Experimental Study of Crack Coalescence Behaviour in Rock-Like Materials Containing Multiple Flaws Under Uniaxial Compression

Experiments on man-made flawed rock-like materials are applied extensively to study the mechanical behaviour of rock masses as well as crack initiation modes and crack coalescence types. A large number of experiments on specimens containing two or three pre-existing flaws were previously conducted. In the present work, experiments on rock-like materials (formed from a mixture of sand, plaster, limestone and water at mass ratio of 126:9:9:16) containing multiple flaws subjected to uniaxial compression were conducted to further research the effects of the layout of pre-existing flaws on mechanical properties, crack initiation modes and crack coalescence types. Compared with previous experiments in which only three types of cracks were found, the present experiments on specimens containing multiple flaws under uniaxial compression revealed five types of cracks, including wing cracks, quasi-coplanar secondary cracks, oblique secondary cracks, out-of-plane tensile cracks and out-of-plane shear cracks. Ten types of crack coalescence occurred through linkage among wing cracks, quasi-coplanar secondary cracks, oblique secondary cracks, out-of-plane shear cracks and out-of-plane tensile cracks. Moreover, the effects of the non-overlapping length and flaw angle on the complete stress–strain curves, the stress of crack initiation, the peak strength, the peak strain and the elastic modulus were also investigated in detail.