“…From the point of view of rock engineering, the effect of thermal treatment in rocks plays a crucial role in different fields of engineering applications such as rock drilling, ore crushing, deep petroleum boring, geothermal energy extraction, deep burial of spent nuclear fuel, and waste disposal (Balme et al, 2004;Homand-Etienne and Houpert, 1989;Kranz, 1983;Nasseri and Mohanty, 2008;Ozguven and Ozcelik, 2014;Yin et al, 2015Yin et al, , 2012. The safe and successful effectuation of modern geotechnical engineering projects such as nuclear waste disposal (Sundberg et al, 2009), underground coal gasification (Roddy and Younger, 2010), CO 2 sequestration (Rutqvist et al, 2002), geothermal heat energy (Zhao, 2000), construction in fire exposed rocks (Zhan and Cai, 2007), hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas recovery Papanastasiou, 1999;Whittaker et al, 1992) requires knowledge of the thermo-mechanical behaviour of rocks.…”