Stress field at a tip of a prefabricated spiral V-notch

Based on the tranditional V-notched blasting, a technique of spirally V-notched blasting to loosen earth and rock was presented. Fracture mechanics and Westergaard stress function were adopted to build a complex stress function to derive the plane stress and strain fields at one tip of the crack under a quasi-static pressure. An expression was formulated to define the stress intensity factor of spiral V-notch loosen blasting. Factors that have effects on the stress intensity factor were studied. It is demonstrated that spiral V-notch loosen blasting is an extension of vertical V-notch blasting, straight cracking, and alike theories.