Homogenized constitutive laws for rocks with elastoplastic fractures

This work deals with the development of a constitutive law for fractured rocks. Fractures are considered as penny‐shaped inclusions, whose constitutive law is deduced from an interface law and a regularization procedure. Such a method is applied to linear and non‐linear interface behaviours in order to reproduce effects such as an increase in stiffness during fracture closing, dilatancy or asperity surface degradation. Then, considering the fractured rock as a composite material, we use a Mori–Tanaka method to estimate the homogenized properties of the rock. Numerical experiments illustrate the interest of the proposed homogenization procedure. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.