Study on Influence of Joint Locations and Hydraulic Coupling Actions on Rock Masses’ Failure Process

Distribution of joints and fissures under hydraulic coupling condition is particularly critical to the stability of surrounding rock masses in underground engineering construction. In this paper, DDARF (Discontinuous Deformation Analysis for Rock Failure) and RFPA (Rock Failure Process Analysis) are compared and analyzed firstly based on laboratory tests. Then using preferred software RFPA, the failure process, stress state, acoustic emission characteristics and energy dissipation laws of rock masses with different joint locations are analyzed under the hydraulic coupling condition. Results show that a large tensile stress region is generated on both ends of the original joint with the micro-cracks’ propagation, water pressure in cracks promotes the generation of tensile stress to a certain extent, damage effect angle increases gradually from the rock specimen with the middle joint to that with the marginal joint; the same water pressure has a certain auxiliary effect on the main crack failure when the joint is close to the middle part of the specimen, and has a dominant effect on the local crack failure when the joint is far away from the middle; the maximum water pressure shows the “U” shaped distribution. At low initial water pressure, stresses of specimens with symmetrical joint locations have similar evolution trends, while at high initial water pressure, the water pressure in cracks has significant dissipation and thus the maximum water pressure in the system does not exceed the initial value. The length of the main crack path is positively proportional to the number of acoustic emissions and the energy accumulation capacity, and evolution of the damage variable basically shows a development trend of steady growth-rapid growth-steady growth