A crack-induced stress approach to describe the tensile strength of transversely isotropic rocks

Rocks are generally more or less anisotropic, depending on their structure at the scale of interest. In engineering applications, the magnitude of such anisotropy must often be determined for compressive as well as tensile loading conditions. In this paper, the authors present the results of an investigation on tensile failure of transversely isotropic rocks, based on Inglis' analytical solution for the stress at the boundary of an elliptical flaw. The strength of transversely isotropic rocks is assumed to be controlled by the maximum tensile local stress along the crack boundary. Equations are developed and compared with tensile test data taken from the literature. The results show that the proposed formulations represent well the direct and indirect tensile strength of anisotropic rocks as a function of bedding plane orientation. It is also shown that the proposed physical model correlates well with the results obtained from more empirical formulations.