The intrinsic relationships between energy dissipation,energy release,strength and abrupt structural failure are key to understanding the evolution of deformational processes in rocks.Theoretical and experimental studies confirm that energy plays an important role in rock deformation and failure.Dissipated energy from external forces produces damage and irreversible deformation within rock and decreases rock strength over time.Structural failure of rocks is caused by an abrupt release of strain energy that manifests as a catastrophic breakdown of the rock under certain conditions.The strain energy released in the rock volume plays a pivotal role in generating this abrupt structural failure in the rocks.In this paper,we propose criteria governing（1） the deterioration of rock strength based on energy dissipation and（2） the abrupt structural failure of rocks based on energy release.The critical stresses at the time of abrupt structural failure under various stress states can be determined by these criteria.As an example,the criteria have been used to analyze the failure conditions of surrounding rock of a circular tunnel.
The characterization of pore structure in rocks is relevant in determining their various mechanical behaviors. Digital image processing methods integrated with fractal theory were applied to analyze images of rock slices obtained from industry CT, elucidating the characteristics of rock pore structure and the relationship between porosity and fractal dimensions. The gray values of pixels in CT images of rocks provide comprehensive results with respect to the attenuation coefficients of various materials in corresponding rock elements, and these values also reflect the effect of rock porosity at various scales. A segmentation threshold can be determined by inverse analysis based on the pore ratios that are measured experimentally, and subsequently binary images of rock pores can be obtained to study their topological structures. The fractal dimension of rock pore structure increases with an increase in rock pore ratio, and fractal dimensions might differ even if pore ratios are the same. The more complex the structure of a rock, the larger the fractal dimension becomes. The experimental studies have validated that fractal dimension calculated directly from gray CT images of rocks can give an effective complementary parameter to use alongside pore ratios and they can suitably represent the fractal characteristics of rock pores.
