Failure Process of Brittle Rock Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

This paper presents a numerical procedure based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to analyze the failure process of a rock medium by predicting the initiation of microcracks. The subsequent propagation of cracks has also been analyzed without any special treatment or assumption regarding fracturing process. The procedure for implementing softening elastoplastic model has been discussed in the SPH framework. For failure of a rock specimen under uniaxial compression, the Drucker-Prager yield criterion is used in the elastic-plastic constitutive model by considering associative and nonassociative plastic flow rules. The Rankine maximum tensile failure criterion is implemented to model the tensile failure of a circular rock specimen. The results obtained from this study have been compared with laboratory tests and existing analytical solutions. It is found that the developed procedure has the potential to provide useful information to understand the key physical phenomena that occur in the failure process.