Behavior of Marble under Compression

Results of experimental and theoretical studies of the micromechanical behavior of marble under compression are presented. A cylindrical marble specimen was submerged in a molten metal alloy under compression and the alloy was driven into voids and fractures by pore pressure. The alloy was solidified at a certain stage of the experiment in order to preserve the geometry of microcracks as they existed under load and to distinguish these cracks from those generated during sample polishing. With a surface tension of 400 mN m, the alloy could penetrate into flat cracks with apertures as fine as 0.08 m under a pore pressure of 10.3 MPa (1,500 psi). This technique also facilitated observation of the microcracks in three dimensions. A comprehensive image analysis was performed on the cracking pattern developed in the marble samples. The propagation of the cracking process was modeled using nonlinear discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) with a finite-element meshed block system.