Observation of microscopic damage accumulation in brittle solids subjected to dynamic compressive loading

Dynamic failure of brittle materials is a fundamental physical problem that has significantly impacts to many science and engineering disciplines. As the first and the most important step towards the full understanding of this problem, one has to observe dynamic damage accumulation in brittle solids. In this work, we proposed a methodology to do that and demonstrated it by studying the dynamic compressive damage evolution of a granitic rock loaded with a modified split Hopkinson pressure bar system. To ensure consistency of the experimental results, we used cylindrical rock samples fabricated from the same rock core and subjected them to identical incident loading pulse. Using a special soft recovery technique, we stopped the dynamic loading on the samples at different strain levels, ranging from 0.3% to 1.4%. Therefore, we were able to recover intact samples loaded all the way to the post-peak deformation stage. The recovered samples were subsequently examined with X-ray micro-CT scanning machine. Three dimensional microcrack network induced by the dynamic loading was observed and the evolution of microcracks as a function of the dynamic loading strain was obtained.