Acoustic emission evolution and fracture mechanism of rock for direct tensile failure

Abstract

The failure mechanisms of engineering rock masses primarily involve tensile and shear failure. Differentiating between the acoustic emission (AE) signals generated during the tensile and shear damage processes in rock can provide a scientific basis for the classification of acoustic signals in field rock fracture monitoring. This paper presents a study on acoustic emission monitoring during the direct tensile testing of granite, proposing a method for classifying AE signals based on the damage and failure processes of the samples. Additionally, the classification of tensile and shear AE signals is explored. The main conclusions are as follows. The proportion of low-frequency signals (frequency <200 kHz) and high-frequency signals (frequency >200 kHz) in all AE signals was found to be 81.6 % and 19.4 %, respectively. Based on an integrated classification and statistical method for AE signals in rock tensile failure, which involves steps such as “denoising the raw waveform, time-frequency domain data transformation, fuzzification processing, extraction of dominant frequency and corresponding amplitude, and identification of secondary dominant frequencies,” the AE signals were categorized into two types, A and B. Type A signals accounted for an average of 7.6 %, while Type B signals made up 92.4 %. Based on the polarity determination method, the focal mechanisms of AE (Acoustic Emission) events were identified. In tensile events, the average proportion of Type A signals was 8.34 %, while the average proportion of Type B signals was 91.66 %. The Brazilian splitting test also yielded classification results similar to those obtained from direct tensile testing. Thus, it was preliminarily concluded that Type A signals, characterized by the presence of both a primary and secondary frequency, correspond to shear signals, whereas Type B signals, which only exhibit a primary frequency without a secondary frequency, correspond to tensile signals.