The properties of anisotropic conical failure surfaces in relation to the Mohr–Coulomb criterion

An earlier publication¹ considered the properties of circular conical failure surfaces whose axes coincide with the space diagonal in principal stress space. The present work uses a similar approach to analyse conical surfaces that are offset from the space diagonal. It is shown that cones fitted to the Mohr–Coulomb surface in triaxial compression contain a potential singularity. The occurrence and location of the singularity depends on the Mohr–Coulomb friction angle to which the surface is fitted in triaxial extension. It is shown that for a cone fitted to the same friction angle in both triaxial extension and compression, singular conditions occur when that angle reaches \documentclass{article}\pagestyle{empty}\begin{document}$ \sin ^{ - 1} \left({\sqrt 7 - 2} \right)\left({ = 40.22^\circ } \right) $\end{document}. Even cones fitted to smaller friction angles give significant overestimations of material strength for certain stress paths.