Structure–Energy Regularities of Accumulation of Damages during Deformation of a Heterogeneous Material

The accumulation of defects during uniaxial compression of a natural heterogeneous material has been studied experimentally. The defect formation process has been controlled using two methods of nondestructive testing: acoustic emission (AE) and X-ray computer tomography (CT). Simultaneous use of these methods makes it possible to establish the correspondence between the energy characteristics of AE that accompanies the defect formation and the volume of these defects. It is found that the dependence of the defect volume on the summary energy of the AE signals is linear, which corresponds to the phenomenological dependences obtained for the tectonic earthquake focuses before. The linear dependence is used to estimate the average defect size. It is shown that the average linear defect size is not larger than 100 μm independent of the assumptions on the defect shape.