Numerical investigation on progressive fracture behaviours of macroscopic heterogeneous rock bridge

Failure of jointed rocks is highly dependent on the presence of rock bridges that exist across joint surfaces. It has long been assumed that such bridges are homogeneous orders, but continued investigation has found that, more often than not, they are a heterogeneous order. In this paper, the failure processes of generalised rock bridges (including two barriers and one which contains an inclusion) under compression with confinement are...