Strength characteristics of transversely isotropic rock materials

For rock materials, a transversely isotropic failure criterion established through the extended Lade-Duncan failure criterion incorporating an anisotropic state scalar parameter, which is a joint invariant of deviatoric microstructure fabric tensor and normalized deviatoric stress tensor, is verified with the results of triaxial compressive data on Tournemire shale. For torsional shear mode with $0{\leq}b{\leq}0.75$, rock shear strengths decrease with ${\alpha}$ increasing until the rock shear strength approaches minimum value at ${\alpha}{\approx}40^{\circ}$, and after this point, the rock shear strengths increase as ${\alpha}$ increases further. For the torsional shear mode with b > 0.75, rock shear strengths are almost constant for ${\alpha}{\leq}40^{\circ}$, but it increases with increase in ${\alpha}$ afterwards. The rock shear strength variation against ${\alpha}$ agrees with shear strength changing tendency of heavily OCR natural London Clays tested before. Prediction results show that the transversely isotropic failure criterion proposed in the paper is reasonable.