Abstract
Inadvertent violent rock failure at large scales translated into injuries to personnel, loss of lives, production delay, damage to equipment and mine infrastructure, mine closure, and loss of the entire mineral reserves exploitation are significant consequences of the lack of proper knowledge of rock failure behavior. Rock violent failure is a substantial threat to the future exploitation of deep mining resources worldwide. A Proper characterization of the complete process of rock deformation in pre-peak and post-peak regimes, associated with the decrease of rock load-carrying capacity, is critical to many civil engineering applications, mining development projects, and mineral exploration operations. Rock brittle fracture damage, detrimental to the surface and underground rock excavations' stability, is amongst major practical applications. In addition, rock complete stress-strain behavior is essential to investigate drilling and excavation performance in the mining industry and civil engineering projects.
The mechanism which controls violent/non-violent rock failure is studied through an extensive experimental study of compression loading on different rocks. Different loading methods were adopted to undertake monotonic and cyclic loading tests, including axial displacement-controlled, lateral displacement-controlled, and a linear combination of stress and strain methods. The results of these methods are compared, and their applicability and limitations to measure post-failure stress-strain behavior is discussed and demonstrated.