Coalescence of Two Cracks in Uni-Axial Compression

Crack coalescence, which was responsible for some engineering disasters such as rock burst, and so on, was studied by one new numerical method-lattice cellular automata. A cellular automaton is made up of cell, lattice, state, neighbor and rule. It has advantages of locality, parallelization etc. Lattice cellular automata are presented which have the advantages of both cellular automata and lattice model. In this model cell will be connected with its neighbor cells in virtue of beams. The basic thoughts of LCA can be expressed as below. The heterogeneity of rock is introduced by randomly assigning the mechanical parameters of beams following Weibull distribution. According to equilibrium equations, deform equations and the constitute equations the local rules of cells can be constructed. Then lattice cellular automata were used to study the coalescence of two cracks with different geometries. The influences of arrangement and spacing of two cracks on the coalescence were studied. The numerical simulation results were in good accordance with the experimental results.