Experimental Investigation on the Strength, Deformability, Failure Behavior and Acoustic Emission Locations of Red Sandstone Under Triaxial Compression

Conventional triaxial compression and “reducing confining pressure” experiments were carried out for red sandstone by an MTS815 Flex Test GT rock mechanics experimental system. Our results show that the post-peak axial deformation characteristics of red sandstone changed as the confining pressure was increased from 5 to 65 MPa. Young’s modulus of red sandstone increased nonlinearly with increasing confining pressure, but Poisson’s ratio remained unaffected. Using our new data, the compactive and dilatant behavior, strength and failure characteristics of sandstone under triaxial compression are further discussed. For our data, the nonlinear Hoek-Brown criterion better reflects the peak strength properties than the linear Mohr-Coulomb criterion. However, the residual strength shows a clear linear relationship with confining pressure, which can be best described using the linear Mohr-Coulomb criterion. The peak and residual strengths were not directly related to the two different loading paths. The onset of dilatancy (C′), the switch from compaction-dominated to dilatant-dominated behavior (D′) and the stress at zero volumetric strain all increased linearly with the confining pressure. In our conventional triaxial compression experiments, the failure mode changed from mixed tension and shear fracture (single shear fracture) to shear fracture with double slippage planes with increasing confining pressure. However, the failure mode in our “reducing confining pressure” experiments was more complicated and results mainly from the unstable failure characteristics of the rock during the reduction in confining pressure. Finally, based on our acoustic emission (AE) locations, at a confining pressure of 35 MPa, a detailed analysis of the evolutionary process of internal cracks is presented for the entire loading process.