Abstract:

The internal mesomechanical constitution and structure of rock determine the stress and strain distributions; and hence control the failure mechanism and process of the rock under to loading. The digital image processing (DIP), adopted as a tool of precise measurement and digital representation for the spatial distribution of different components of geomaterials, has been widely applied to the internal structural quantitative analysis of rock at the meso-level. The digital image processing is currently taken as an innovative method for investigating the rock mesomechanical behavior. At present the relevant researches mainly focus on: non- contact measurement of rock fracture aperture, digital representation of rock heterogeneity, analysis of rock mesomechanical behavior, establishing correspondence of rock’s numerical characteristic with its physico-mechanical properties in order to achieve fluid and solid coupling mechanisms, establishing numerical simulations for rock mesomechanics. Based on a comprehensive review of related researches documented in literatures, this paper investigates and discusses in detail the characteristic and development of the digital image processing in quantitative analysis of various rock mesomechanical problems; and analyses the advantages and shortcomings of these research methods. The digital image processing has a great potential to be developed and utilized in rock engineering due to its proved efficacy in measuring geomaterial spatial distributions.

Key words: digital image, rock mesomechanics, quantitative analysis, crack, heterogeneity, coupling, numerical simulation