Acoustic emission and digital image correlation for damage evolution in brittle rocks under time-dependent tensile loading

Abstract Time-dependent rock deformation is considered to precede dynamic failure in many rock-engineering projects and natural geohazards. In order to understand long-term performance of brittle rocks, we gather mechanical load, strain, acoustic emission (AE) and digital image correlation (DIC) data to describe the evolution of damage and cracking in response to tensile loading during multi-stage relaxation experiments on inverted single edge notch bending (iSENB) specimens. The source locations of the AEs correspond to a process zone ahead and around the notch indicating the evolution of the microcracks. The results showed that the cracks first start aseismicaly under subcritical growth until 10mm from the tip of the notch and then they grow seismically by showing seismic signals in the form of acoustic emissions. It was observed that the process zone obtained by DIC is smaller than the cloud of the AE locations. This can be partially because DIC only shows surface deformation and partially because of the errors associated with the AE source locations such as ignoring anisotropic velocity, sampling rate, sensor locations, etc. Moment tensor analyses of the AE signals showed that both tensile and shear cracks are involved in the micro-scale although in the macroscopic scale the damage process is mostly considered as tensile. The results showed that microcracks start as tensile, and then continue as shear, especially at the end of the crack where the specimen experiences compression loading.