An Experimental Investigation of Moisture-Induced Softening Mechanism of Marble Based on Quantitative Analysis of Acoustic Emission Waveforms

The decrease of strength after saturation of rocks is known as moisture-induced softening. To date, there are numerous studies on the mechanism of moisture-induced softening of different rocks. However, due to a lack of effective observational methods, the microcosmic mechanism of moisture-induced softening still needs to be understood. We collected and processed acoustic emission (AE) signals during the uniaxial compression test of marble specimens. The results of spectral and statistical analysis show that two dominant frequency bands of AE waveforms exist regardless of the specimen’s water content. Additionally, for the AE signals from the saturated specimens, the ranges of the low and high frequency bands are wider than dried rock samples. Besides, since the tensile and shear failures in the rock release low and high dominant frequency AE signals, respectively, the test results of this paper show that micro-shear and micro-tensile failures dominate the final failure of dried and saturated rocks, respectively