Effect of Water Content on Dynamic Fracture Characteristic of Rock under Impacts

Water contents in rocks vary with local hydrogeological conditions and may significantly affect the stability of rock mass engineering. For example, geological disasters are usually occurring after rainfall, such as landslides, karst collapse. In this paper, drop plate impact (DPI) tests were performed on single cleavage triangle (SCT) red sandstone specimens with dry, natural, absorbed and saturated conditions, which has a great guiding significance for deep understanding of dynamic failure of rock materials. The crack initiation time was obtained by crack propagation gauges (CPGs), and crack propagation speeds were computed by fractal method. The dynamic stress intensity factors (DSIFs) were calculated by ABAQUS code. Meanwhile, the microstructure of the fracture surface was scanned and was analyzed. The results show that the average critical DSIFs and crack propagation speeds vary with water content significantly. For the dry sandstone, the average critical DSIF is the highest, whereas the average crack speed is the lowest. For the natural sandstone, the average critical DSIF is the lowest, whereas the average crack speed is the highest. For the water-bearing sandstone, i.e., the natural, absorbed and saturated sandstone, the average critical DSIF increases with water content, whereas the crack speed decreases with increasing water content.