Fracture properties and tensile strength of three typical sandstone materials under static and impact loads

The failure behavior and tensile strength of sandstone materials under different strain rates are greatly different, especially under static loads and impact loads. In order to clearly investigate the failure mechanism of sandstone materials under static and impact loads, a series of Brazilian disc samples were used by employing green sandstone, red sandstone and black sandstone to carry out static and impact loading splitting tensile tests, and the failure properties subjected to two different loading conditions were analyzed and discussed. Subsequently, the failure behavior of sandstone materials also were simulated by finite element code. The good agreement between simulation results and experimental results can obtain the following significantly conclusions: (1) The relationship of the tensile strength among sandstone materials is that green sandstone red sandstone > black sandstone; (2) The mainly cause for the difference of dynamic tensile strength of sandstone materials is that the strength of crystal particles in sandstone material, and the tensile strength of sandstone is proportional to the fractal dimension; (3) The dynamic failure behavior of sandstone is greatly different from that of static failure behavior, and the dynamic tensile failure rate in dynamic failure behavior is about 54.92%.