An Experimental Investigation of Tensile Fracturing Behavior of Natural and Artificial Rocks in Static and Dynamic Brazilian Disc Tests

In this work, 3D printing (3DP) technology is applied to study rock fracturing behaviors in Brazilian disc tests. First, uniaxial compression tests were performed to identify the most suitable 3DP material from five available 3DP materials, i.e., ceramics, gypsum, PMMA (poly methyl methacrylate), SR20 (Acrylic copolymer) and resin (accura (R) 60), to simulate hard and brittle rocks. The experimental results demonstrated that the transparent resin produced via Stereolithography (SLA) was the best 3DP material for mimicking rocks. Then, static and dynamic Brazilian disc tests were carried out on the resin-based 3DP rocks and the corresponding prototype rocks. The testing results show that the fracturing behaviours of the 3DP rocks agreed well with those of the prototype rocks, which confirms the feasibility and validity of using 3DP to study rock fracturing behaviors in tensile tests. This work facilitates the application of 3DP to rock mechanics. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.