The Maurice A. Biot Endowed Lecture
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Columbia University
New York City
True Triaxial Testing and the Failure of Rocks
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
and Department of Mechanical Engineering
Northwestern University
October 30, 2007 (Tuesday)
2:30-3:30 pm
Abstract: The vast majority of
tests on rocks have been done in axisymmetric configurations in which
two of the principal stresses are equal. This severely limits the
deviatoric stress states that are accessible and makes it difficult to distinguish between various predictions of failure
stress and the orientation of the failure plane. Although K. Mogi did
pioneering work on true triaxial testing (all three principal stresses
are different) in the 1960.s, there has been little systematic work on this subject
since then. Recently, however, Haimson and coworkers have
conducted a series of true triaxial tests on several rock types. This
talk will describe work in progress to interpret these data to gain
additional insight into rock failure and to compare observations with
predictions of failure, including those from the theory of localization
of deformation, and models of inelastic deformation of rock.
Biographical Sketch After earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering at Brown University, John W. Rudnicki was a postdoctoral research fellow in geophysics at Caltech for 18 months, and then Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for three years. In 1981, he moved to Northwestern University where he is now Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. His research has been primarily in the inelastic behavior and failure of geomaterials, particularly in the effects of coupling between deformation and fluid diffusion, in connection with applications to the mechanics of earthquakes, energy storage and recovery and geological sequestration of CO2. Recently, he has also developed a popular undergraduate course on the mechanics of sports. He received the 2006 Biot Medal from the ASCE for "For his fundamental contributions to the mechanics of porous media and its applications to rock mechanics and geophysics."
Biographical Sketch After earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering at Brown University, John W. Rudnicki was a postdoctoral research fellow in geophysics at Caltech for 18 months, and then Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for three years. In 1981, he moved to Northwestern University where he is now Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. His research has been primarily in the inelastic behavior and failure of geomaterials, particularly in the effects of coupling between deformation and fluid diffusion, in connection with applications to the mechanics of earthquakes, energy storage and recovery and geological sequestration of CO2. Recently, he has also developed a popular undergraduate course on the mechanics of sports. He received the 2006 Biot Medal from the ASCE for "For his fundamental contributions to the mechanics of porous media and its applications to rock mechanics and geophysics."