The study of energy balance in rock fracture is one of the directions of the scientific school of deformable solid mechanics developed for several decades at the Department of Structural Mechanics of the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Mining Institute. The formation of this school is connected with the works of L.S. Burshtein, N.S. Bulychev, N.N. Kaidalov, A.N. Stavrogin and others. The practical results of this school are known at many sites of underground construction, in the mining industry, in exploratory drilling. Within the framework of this article, modern ideas about the mechanism of transformation of potential energy of elastic compression into dynamic types of energy during brittle fracture are briefly described, the balance of energy of this process is given, as well as examples of its use in solving a number of contact problems of exploratory drilling, least covered in the technical literature.
