A fiber bundle model for compressive failures of compacted Antarctic snow

Compressive failures of snow pose significant challenges in snow engineering, particularly for snow roads and runways. Analyzing their microstructural evolution under compression is critical for predicting failure mechanisms and improving design reliability. By simplifying the variations in snow microstructural characteristics, the fiber bundle model (FBM) ensures computational efficiency while accounting for the effects of microstructure evolution, thus providing insights into the macroscopic failure behavior of snow. FBM has been successfully applied to simulate shear failure in snow. However, its application to snow compressive failure has rarely been studied. In this paper, FBM was enhanced by incorporating the following features: (a) an increase in the fiber number corresponding to the lateral expansion of the snow sample; (b) an increase in fiber properties as snow densification during compression; (c) a load-dependent probability of fractured fiber sintering to represent the pressure sintering effect; and (d) a damage coefficient that gradually accumulated with increasing strain to account for the micro-crack effect in the ice matrix. By incorporating these physical mechanism-based features, the model replicated the loading rate-dependent characteristics observed in uniaxial compressive experiments of compacted Antarctic snow and showed great potential for understanding and modeling microstructural changes and macroscopic load responses associated with snow compressive failures.