Abstract
Shear failure of rock bridges is an important process in geological phenomena, including landslides and earthquakes. However, the progressive failure of natural rock bridges has not yet been fully understood. In this work, we carried out direct shearing experiments on both granite and marble rock bridges, and applied acoustic emission (AE) monitoring throughout the experiments. With the mechanical curves and the evolution of AE activity (including AE energy rate and b value), the failure of rock bridges can be divided into three pre-failure phases and one ultimate failure phases. We analyzed the effects of normal stress and lithology on the pre-failure phases. We noted that with the increasing of normal stress, the length of stable cracking phase decreases and the length of unstable cracking phase slightly increases, except for marble rock bridges at high normal stress, which maintains a great proportion of stable cracking phase that possibly results from the great off-fault damage. Increasing normal stress also suppresses the dilation of granite rock bridges, but has a different effect on marble rock bridges, which also suggests the effect of lithology on failure modes.