The roughness of the fracture surface directly affects the strength, deformation, and permeability of the surrounding rock in deep underground engineering. Understanding the effect of high temperature and thermal cycle on the fracture surface roughness plays an important role in estimating the damage degree and stability of deep rock mass. In this paper, the variations of fracture surface roughness of granite after different heating and thermal cycles were investigated using the joint roughness coefficient method (JRC), three-dimensional (3D) roughness parameters, and fractal dimension (D), and the mechanism of damage and deterioration of granite were revealed. The experimental results show an increase in the roughness of the granite fracture surface as temperature and cycle number were incremented. The variations of JRC, height parameter, inclination parameter and area parameter with the temperature conformed to the Boltzmann's functional distribution, while the D decreased linearly as the temperature increased. Besides, the anisotropy index (I-p) of the granite fracture surface increased as the temperature increased, and the larger parameter values of roughness characterization at different temperatures were attained mainly in directions of 20 degrees-40 degrees, 60 degrees-100 degrees and 140 degrees-160 degrees. The fracture aperture of granite after fracture followed the Gauss distribution and the average aperture increased with increasing temperature, which increased from 0.665 mm at 25 degrees C to 1.058 mm at 800 degrees C. High temperature caused an uneven thermal expansion, water evaporation, and oxidation of minerals within the granite, which promoted the growth and expansion of microfractures, and reduced interparticle bonding strength. In particular, the damage was exacerbated by the expansion and cracking of the quartz phase transition after T > 500 degrees C. Thermal cycles contributed to the accumulation of this damage and further weakened the interparticle bonding forces, resulting in a significant increase in the roughness, anisotropy, and aperture of the fracture surface after five cycles. (c) 2025 Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4.0/).
Thermally induced volumetric strain of clay is crucial for geotechnical applications involving thermal loading. The volumetric response of clay shows a ratcheting pattern during thermal cycles until reaching a thermal stabilized state. It is also affected by the stress history of soil, including over-consolidation ratio (OCR) and recent stress history (RSH). This paper introduces a new bounding surface model to capture effects of OCR and RSH on thermo-mechanical behaviour of soil. A thermal state parameter is proposed to characterize the effects of stress history and thermal history. Based on the new thermal state parameter, the commonly recognised thermal softening mechanism is modified and incorporated with a bounding surface. The newly proposed model, with only 10 parameters, can provide an elegant approach to predict the volumetric response under thermal cycles coupled with different stress histories well.