Elastic-plastic solution and experimental study on critical water pressure inducing hydraulic fracturing in soil

It is widely believed that hydraulic fracturing will occur in the clay core of an earth-rockfill dam if the water pressure in the core increases to levels that are high enough to allow a fracture to form. An elastic-plastic solution to critical water pressure inducing hydraulic fracturing(fracture initiation pressure) in soil is derived based on Mohr-Coulomb shear failure criterion and the theory of cavity expansion. In order to verify the applicability of the criteria presented and study the relations among fracture initiation pressure, tensile strength and stress state of soil, laboratory tests are performed on compacted cuboid specimens by true triaxial apparatus. According to the test results, the cracks of hydraulic fracturing existed perpendicular to the minor principal stress plane. The hydraulic fracturing pressure pf increases with the increase of dry density of specimen, pf shows good linear relationship with σ2 and σ3. The prediction from presented equation is compared with test results and other three predictions, of which two are tensile failure(TS) criterion, and the other is Mohr-Coulomb(M-C) criterion. The presented solution is verified, and the other three approaches for pf are evaluated. The comparison indicates that the predicted values from the presented equations agree well with the test values for specimens of low dry density, and the error of the prediction is larger for those of high dry density, especially in lower minor stress states. The predicted average relative error of absolute value Ra from TS1 criterion is 13.3% for all specimens of different dry densities, and each prediction is lower than the test data. On the contrary, most of the predicted values from M-C criterion are greater than the test data, but the average relative error from the presented equation is the minimum. Considering the safety of soil works, an equation from TS1 criterion is suggested to evaluate the occurrence of hydraulic fracturing in earth-rockfill dam designing.