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Rock crushing is a common process in mining and related operations. Although a number of particle crushing tests have been proposed in the literature, most of them are concerned with single-particle crushing, i.e., a single rock sample is crushed in each test. Considering the realistic scenario in crushers where many fragments are involved, a laboratory crushing apparatus is developed in this study. This device consists of a Hopkinson pressure bar system and a piston-holder system. The Hopkinson pressure bar system is used to apply calibrated dynamic loads to the piston-holder system, and the piston-holder system is used to hold rock samples and to recover fragments for subsequent particle size analysis. The rock samples are subjected to three to seven impacts under three impact velocities (2.2, 3.8, and 5.0 m/s), with the feed size of the rock particle samples limited between 9.5 and 12.7 mm. Several key parameters are determined from this test, including particle size distribution parameters, impact velocity, loading pressure, and total work. The results show that the total work correlates well with resulting fragmentation size distribution, and the apparatus provides a useful tool for studying the mechanism of crushing, which further provides guidelines for the design of commercial crushers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionally, the evaluation of shear failure of discontinuities in rocks and other geomaterials has been conducted under static shear loading. In such methods, the shear failure behaviors of rock discontinuities are significantly influenced by loading velocities. To evaluate the shear failure process under dynamic loading, in this paper, we propose a new experimental methodology by taking advantages of recently available high-speed optical and mechanical measurement techniques. The methodology utilizes the Hopkinson bar to apply impact loading, and the diagnostics include a dynamic stress wave acquisition system, a digital image correlation (DIC) system, and an acoustic emission (AE) monitoring system. To improve the accuracy of the DIC analysis, an advanced digital speckle pattern and an updated water transfer printing are used to obtain the optimized and consistent speckle pattern. A flexible piezoelectric film sensor is first introduced to acquire AE signals in order to locate AE events accurately. A dynamic impact shear experiment indicates that the normal stress has a significant effect on the peak shear stress of rock discontinuities and the peak shear stress itself is rate dependent. The displacement field along shear directions is quantified using the DIC method, and the initial AE source locations during the impact shear process are determined using the AE monitoring system. We thus conclude that the dynamic impact shear system can systematically characterize the dynamic impact shear process with quantitative details and can further be implemented to study other dynamic impact failure behaviors of rock discontinuities under in situ stresses.

The point-load test (PLT) has been widely used in the field and in the laboratory to estimate the strength of rock materials. The PLT is easy and quick to perform and it is suitable for samples with irregular shapes and therefore has found wide applications. The measured point-load strength (PLS) is considered as a strength index and it has been correlated to the rock compressive strength. To address the engineering applications where the loading is dynamic, the PLT is extended to its dynamic version in this study. The dynamic loading is exerted to the rock specimen using a split Hopkinson pressure bar system. Two conical steel platens are attached to the incident bar and transmitted bar, respectively, to apply the point load to the disc specimen. To enable quasi-static analysis, the pulse shaper technique is utilized to achieve the dynamic force balance. The flexibility of the dynamic PLT method is demonstrated by the application to a well-studied granitic rock-Laurentian granite. The correlation between the dynamic PLS and the dynamic strength of the same rock is established.

Erosion of concrete surfaces in major civil structures is a common problem, which in certain circumstances can undermine the structural and operational integrities of the structure. The manual monitoring of the erosion process can be difficult and dangerous under certain circumstances (such as within hydrotunnels and spillways of dams). This paper describes a concrete erosion sensor based on a chirped fibre Bragg grating (FBG) which is able to monitor the extent of concrete erosion at a single point to sub-millimetre accuracy. The chirped FBG length embedded below the concrete surface decreases as a result of concrete erosion and consequently the reflected light spectrum bandwidth narrows. A simple procedure is presented to determine the extent of erosion, and this procedure is applied to an experimental demonstration of the sensing device.