Experimental and Theoretical Investigations of Hard Rocks at High Temperature: Applications in Civil Engineering

This review paper aims to survey and discuss recent theoretical and experimental works reporting the temperature effects on the mechanical properties of rocks like granite, gabbro, gneiss, marble, sandstone, basalt, limestone, and argillite to permit the new challenge in this domain. The effect of high temperatures on various mechanical and physical material properties (Young’s modulus, porosity, tensile and compressive strengths, P‐wave velocity, permeability, thermal damage, and expansion) is analyzed. This work shows that hard rock mechanical and physical properties evolutions are strongly related to the evolution of the microstructure caused by the geological history, cracks nucleation occurrences, recrystallization, dehydroxylation, and dehydration reactions. However, it should be emphasized that these studies were not conducted on all types of intrusions and all rocks types. Meanwhile, it has been noticed that variations in temperature could lead to contradictory phenomena. Therefore, different trends were observed for the evolution of physical properties of rocks. There is an increase in porosity approximately 80% above 500°C. In general, for volcanic’s rock, the loss mass a