Dilatancy in the fracture of crystalline rocks

Abstract

Volume changes of a granite, a marble, and an aplite were measured during deformation in triaxial compression at confining pressure of as much as 8 kb. Stress-volumetric strain behavior is qualitatively the same for these rocks and a wide variety of other rocks and concrete studied elsewhere. Volume changes are purely elastic at low stress. As the maximum stress becomes one-third to two-thirds the fracture stress at a given pressure, the rocks become dilatant; that is, volume increases relative to elastic changes. The magnitude of the dilatancy, with a few exceptions, ranges from 0.2 to 2.0 times the elastic volume changes that would have occurred were the rock simply elastic. The magnitude of the dilatancy is not markedly affected by pressure, for the range of conditions studied here. For granite, the stress at which dilatancy was first detected was strongly time dependent; the higher the loading rate the higher the stress. Dilatancy, which represents an increase in porosity, was traced in the granite to open cracks which form parallel with the direction of maximum compression.