Modeling rock fragmentation by coupling Voronoi diagram and discretized virtual internal bond

The rock fragmentation involves the inter-block and the intra-block fracture. A simulation method for rock fragmentation is developed by coupling Voronoi diagram (VD) and discretized virtual internal bond (DVIB). The DVIB is a lattice model that consists of bonds. The VD is used to generate the potential block structure in the DVIB mesh. Each potential block may contain any number of bond cells. To characterize the inter-block fracture, a hyperelastic bond potential is employed for the bond cells that are cut by the VD edges. While to characterize the intra-block fracture, an elastobrittle bond potential is adopted for the bonds in a block. By this method, both the inter-block and intra-block fracture can be well simulated. The simulation results suggest that this method is a simple and efficient approach to rock fragmentation simulation with block smash.     

Modified virtual internal bond model based on deformable Voronoi particles

In last time, the series of virtual internal bond model was proposed for solving rock mechanics problems. In these models, the rock continuum is considered as a structure of discrete particles connected by normal and shear springs(bonds). It is well announced that the normal springs structure corresponds to a linear elastic solid with a fixed Poisson ratio, namely, 0.25 for threedimensional cases. So the shear springs used to represent the diversity of the Poisson ratio.However, the shearing force calculation is not rotationally invariant and it produce difficulties in application of these models for rock mechanics problems with sufficient displacements. In this letter, we proposed the approach to support the diversity of the Poisson ratio that based on usage of deformable Voronoi cells as set of particles. The edges of dual Delaunay tetrahedralization are considered as structure of normal springs(bonds). The movements of particle's centers lead to deformation of tetrahedrals and as result to deformation of Voronoi cells. For each bond, there are the corresponded dual face of some Voronoi cell. We can consider the normal bond as some beam and in this case, the appropriate face of Voronoi cell will be a cross section of this beam. If during deformation the Voronoi face was expand, then, according Poisson effect, the length of bond should be decrees. The above mechanism was numerically investigated and we shown that it is acceptable for simulation of elastic behavior in 0.1–0.3 interval of Poisson ratio. Unexpected surprise is that proposed approach give possibility to simulate auxetic materials with negative Poisson's ratio in interval from –0.5 to –0.1.     

Micromechanical consideration of tensile crack behavior based on virtual internal bond in contrast to cohesive stress

A modified version of the virtual internal bond model (VIB) is presented. This involves the introduction of a R-bond restricting the relative rotation freedom of pairwise mass particle. Such a modification allows the VIB model to consider arbitrary values of the Poisson ratio. A linear elastic cohesive law considering both the R-bond and L-bond are assumed. The constitutive relationship is derived using the Cauchy–Born rules. The derived constitutive associates the bond stiffness with the Young’s modulus and Poisson ratio of materials. This gives the bond stiffness in terms of the Young’s modulus and Poisson ratio of materials.The modified VIB model is then used to analyze the tensile crack behavior. In contrast to the cohesive stress method, the deformation-governed concept will be used. The local materials failure is assumed to coincide with the reduction of the bond density due to the local deformation rather than by the local cohesive stress. A phenomenological relationship between the bond density and the deformation is established. The criterion which is applied to determined crack initiation and propagation is built into the constitutive model. As an example, the method is used to study the crack initiation and propagation behavior under tensile loading.