Experimental study on the mechanical behavior and failure characteristics of rock analogs with filled internal fractures: A new method by sand powder 3D printing

Rock formations naturally contain intricate internal fractures due to various environmental factors. Such fractures result in significant weakening of the mechanical properties of the rock mass. As factures have different geometric features and fill material characteristics, it is difficult to replicate their complex behavior in the laboratory. This poses a serious limitation on the experimental investigation of the mechanical properties of fractured rocks. Sand powder 3D printing (3DP) can overcome the limitations of casting methods in preparing samples with complex fractures and thus is widely applied in soft rock mechanics experiments. This paper utilizes Computer Tomography (CT) scanning to obtain the probability distribution patterns of fractures in fractured rock samples. Additionally, it combines sand powder 3DP technology to generate soft rock-like samples with internal networks of filled fractures. Uniaxial compression experiments employing digital image correlation (DIC) and acoustic emission (AE) techniques are used to investigate the mechanical properties, deformation characteristics, and fracture evolution patterns of samples with different fracture densities. By increasing the fracture density, the peak strength of the soft rock-like samples exponentially decreases, and the deformation characteristics linearly decrease. Crack propagation paths mostly follow the prefabricated fracture trajectories and loading direction. An RA-AF analysis suggests that the failure mode of the soft rock-like samples transitions from diagonal shear failure to block-shaped shear failure with increasing fracture density. These research findings represent a novel sand powder 3DP approach for studying the complex mechanics of complex fractured rocks.