Stress ratio effect on fatigue life of tropically weathered rock: Fid-Bau Portal

Stress ratio effect on fatigue life of tropically weathered rock

bt Mohd Salim, Nurul Ainain / Mohamed, Zainab / Berhan, Mohamad Nor

Abstract This paper investigates the fatigue life of weathered granite and weathered sandstone using a stress ratio of R = 0.17. A small stress ratio is adopted to control data discrepancy between weathered rocks for which stress amplitude is known to affect the fatigue life. The range of varying static strength between weathered rocks, especially for highly weathered rock (grade IV) which has lower static strength, resulted in adopting this small stress ratio. The details of rocks tested, including microscopic petrographic characterization as well as their physical properties obtained from laboratory work, is also explained in this paper. Weathered rock specimens from slightly weathered to highly weathered (grade II, grade III and grade IV) granite and sandstone were used during the investigation. The specimens were representative of rock collected in Sungai Buloh (granite) and Puncak Perdana (sandstone) in Selangor, Malaysia. In order to eliminate the influence of frequency and waveform, all rock specimens (54 in total) were tested under a cyclic compression load with a frequency of 1 Hz using a constant sinusoidal waveform. Result shows that grade IV specimens are the least affected by the small cyclic stress ratio as compared to grade II and grade III specimens. The number of cycles to failure is not dependent on rock weathering grade; it is greatly related to the petrological and microstructure of the individual rock. However, the weathering degree of a rock does contribute to the weakening of the rock's structure, consequently affecting the life of the rock.