A numerical and experimental study on the tensile behavior of plasma shocked granite under dynamic loading

This paper presents a numerical and experimental study on the mechanical behavior of plasma shocked rock. The dynamic tensile behavior of plasma shock treated Balmoral Red granite was studied under dynamic loading using the Brazilian disc test and the Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar device. Different heat shocks were produced on the Brazilian disc samples by moving the plasma gun over the sample at different speeds. Microscopy clearly showed that as the duration of the thermal shock increases, the number of the surface cracks and their complexity increases (quantified here as the fractal dimension of the crack patterns) and the area of the damaged surface grows larger as well. At the highest thermal shock duration of 0.80 seconds the tensile strength of the Brazilian disc sample drops by approximately 20%. In the numerical simulations of the dynamic Brazilian disc test, this decrease in tensile strength was reproduced by modeling the plasma shock induced damage using the embedded discontinuity finite element method. The damage caused by the plasma shock was modeled by two methods, namely by pre-embedded discontinuity populations with zero strength and by assuming that the rock strength is lowered and conform to the Weibull distribution. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of the effects of the heat shock, the surface microstructure and mechanical behavior of the studied rock, and a promising numerical model to account for the pre-existing crack distributions in a rock material.