ON THE DETERMINATION OF A SHEAR PLANE DIRECTION USING THE COULOMB-MOHR THEORY

Abstract

The main difficulty in using the Coulomb-Mohr theory for estimating shear as a mode of failure is that this theory does not take into account the tilt or rotation of the shear surface at a given strain, which have to be assume by conjecture. This paper offers a tensor extension of the Coulomb-Mohr formulation which allows one to determine the orientation of a shear plane as a direction which gives an extremum for a quadratic-bilinear stress tensor form related to the Coulomb-Mohr criterion.