Shear creep deformation of rock fracture distrubed by dynamic loading

The long-term stability of jointed rock masses is usually dominated by fault activation, which may be triggered by the dynamic disturbance generated by blasting during mining activities, leading to the occurrence of disasters such as landslides in open-pit and rockbursts in deep mining. The initial stress and dynamic disturbance are key factors that strongly affect the shear creep behavior of rock fractures. In this work, the shear failure instability of rock fractures of sandstone under creep-impact loading was experimentally investigated by using a creep-impact test machine, which allows for applying creep loading and an additional dynamic disturbance on rock fractures. Three stages of shear creep deformation, creep strain rate, and time-to-failure are examined under different creep stress levels and impact energies. Experimental results show that the tangential and normal creep rates increase with the increase of creep stress and impact energy, but the increment of tangential creep rate is higher than that of the normal creep rate. The time-to-failure of the creeping specimen is shortened under high creep stress and large impact energy, while the time-to-failure after the last dynamic disturbance of the specimen is determined by the total impact energy and creep stress level. By using high-speed photography, it is found that the failure types of rock depend on the magnitude of impact energy and creep stress level; that is, rock mainly slides with low stress levels and shears off with high stress levels. In addition, under different impact energy and creep stress levels, the variation of height is between 0.38 and 0.52, while the defined fracture factor, which describes the degree of failure of serrations, is between 0.30 and 0.54. The findings can provide deep insight into the fault sliding mechanism caused by mining activities, which provides theoretical support for the safe mining of ore in fault fracture zones.