Failure Behavior of Room and Pillar with Different Room Configuration Under Uniaxial Loading Using Experimental Test and Numerical Simulation

This paper investigates different configuration of the room and pillar under uniaxial loading using experimental and particle flow code in two dimension (PFC2D). Dimensions of prepared concrete specimens were chosen as 150 mm × 150 mm × 50 mm and rooms and pillars with different configurations were prepared within the specimens. The rooms dimensions were selected as 10 mm*10 mm and the pillars dimensions were determined based on rooms configuration. 12 different configurations were chosen for rooms and pillars. The tensile strength of material and the rate of axial load were 1 MPa and 0.05 mm/min, respectively. The results indicated that the failure process was affected by the pillar configuration, significantly and failure mechanism of the pillars was depended on the compressive strength of the samples, substantially. Besides, It was demonstrated that number of the induced tensile cracks affected the shear behaviour of pillars and are increased by increasing the rooms’ angles. Also, by increasing the rooms angle, the models strength is increased. The failure pattern and failure strength are similar in both approaches.