Indirect tensile test assessments for rock materials using 3-D disc-type specimens

Indirect test methods are usually the preferred approach for determining the tensile strength of brittle and quasi-brittle materials such as ceramics, rocks, and concrete. In this paper, the tensile strength of a rock material (Iranian Harsin marble) was obtained indirectly by means of two disc type samples. The test samples were the well-known Brazilian disc and semi-disc specimen under three-point bend loading. Since the existing formula for determining the indirect tensile strength is based on 2-D stress assumption which ignores the effects of specimen thickness, a general 3-D tensile strength formulation was derived for each sample by employing finite element analysis. A series of tensile strength tests were conducted on Harsin white marble using disc and semi-disc specimens with different thicknesses in parallel to finite element analysis. The test results using 3-D formulation showed that the tensile strength of the tested marble depends on the thickness/diameter ratio of the specimen and generally decreases from 11.5 to 7 MPa on increasing the thickness of test samples. The average values of tensile strength were about 8.8 MPa for the Brazilian disc specimen and 9.8 MPa for the semi-disc specimen. The good agreement existing between the results of the two specimens suggests that the semi-disc specimen can also be used for determining the rock tensile strength in addition to using the conventional Brazilian test.