“…Often the crack damage stress is defined as the change from bulk sample volume decrease to increase under increasing differential stress (σ 1 − σ 3 ) (e.g. Martin, 1997;Palchik and Hatzor, 2002;Corkum, 2020;Taheri et al, 2020;Wen et al, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023;Li et al, 2023;Xiao et al, 2023), which is identical to the onset of dilatancy (Alkan et al, 2007;Wu et al, 2018;Zhang, 2018) or the point of critical energy release (Bieniawski, 1967). Some authors (Chang and Lee, 2004;Taheri et al, 2020) define the crack damage stress as the point in the volumetric stiffness curve where stiffness values changed from positive to negative or as the point where cumulative acoustic emission curves increase abruptly.…”