Damage-viscoplastic consistency model for rock fracture in heterogeneous rocks under dynamic loading

This paper presents a damage-viscoplastic consistency model for numerical simulation of brittle fracture in heterogeneous rocks. The model is based on a combination of the recent viscoplastic consistency model by Wang and the isotropic damage concept with separate damage variables in tension and compression. This approach does not suffer from ill-posedness, caused by strain softening, of the underlying boundary/initial value problem since viscoplasticity provides the regularization by introducing a length scale effect under dynamic loading conditions. The model uses the Mohr Coulomb yield criterion with the Rankine criterion as a tensile cut-off. The damage law in compression is calibrated via the degradation index concept of Fang and Harrison. Thereby, the model is able to capture the brittle-to-ductile transition occurring in confined compression at a certain level of confinement. The heterogeneity of rock is accounted for by the statistical approach based on the Weibull distribution. Numerical simulations of confined compression test in plane strain conditions demonstrate a good agreement with the experiments at both the material point and structural levels as the fracture modes are realistically predicted. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.