ABSTRACT
Until quite recently, the detailed mechanisms of rock cutting have not been well understood. Although numerous experimental and theoretical investigations have been carried out in the past decades right up to the present time (e.g. Copur, 2010), fracture evolution in real materials during mechanical cutting is rarely observed directly in standard laboratory tests. Also, in these tests, only the outward appearance of the failure phenomena can be observed because of the rock’s opacity. In terms of interpreting and characterising the rock failure in this context, Mishnaevsky (1998) has discussed damage and fracture of heterogeneous materials in terms of rock fragmentation and damage evolution using theories of information, fractals, fuzzy sets and the theory of complex systems, but empirical and idealised analytical models cannot predict the internal fracture evolution fully due to their simplified assumptions. The failure process in detail is, however, traceable through numerical modelling and so we will discuss and present examples of rock cutting simulations to reveal the detailed rock breakdown process in these circumstances.
