Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2010
Introduction
Compressive failure more often than not occurs under a multi-axial state of stress. For example, during the interaction between a floating ice feature and an engineered structure, material within the contact zone is compressed not only along the direction of impact, but also in orthogonal directions, owing to constraint imposed by surrounding material. The confinement induces biaxial (thin feature, wide structure) and triaxial (thick feature, narrow structure) stress states, which, as we show below, have a large effect on the strength of the ice and on its mode of failure.
This is not surprising. Based upon the failure of unconfined material and on the importance to that process of frictional crack sliding cum the development of secondary cracks (Chapter 11), confinement plays two roles: it lessens the excess or effective shear stress that drives sliding; and it lowers the mode-I stress intensity factor that drives crack growth. Higher applied stresses are thus required to activate the mechanism. Also, in holding the ice together, confinement promotes the development of shear faults. Indeed, very little confinement is required (Wachter et al., 2008), to the effect that from a practical perspective faulting and not axial splitting is the more important failure mode.
In this chapter we review the observations and their interpretation. We again begin with a short discussion of experimental methods, and then quantify the effects of confinement on the behavior of both granular and columnar polycrystalline ice.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.