Rock Engineering

Rock Engineering is a valuable reference tool for geotechnical engineers, geologists, consultants, contractors, and advanced students on rock engineering and engineering geology courses.

Engineering rock mechanics is the discipline used to design structures built in rock. These structures encompass building foundations, dams, slopes, shafts, tunnels, caverns, hydroelectric schemes, mines, radioactive waste repositories and geothermal energy projects: in short, any structure built on or in a rock mass. Despite the variety of projects that use rock engineering, the principles remain the same. Engineering Rock Mechanics clearly and systematically explains the key principles behind rock engineering. The book covers the basic rock mechanics principles; how to study the interactions between these principles and a discussion on the fundamentals of excavation and support and the application of these in the design of surface and underground structures. Engineering Rock Mechanics is recommended as an across-the-board source of information for the benefit of anyone involved in rock mechanics and rock engineering.

This book is concerned with time-dependency in rock mechanics and rock engineering, whose spectrum is very wide. While the term “time-dependency” involves time-dependent behavior/rate-dependent behavior of rocks in a conventional sense, this books attempts to cover the spectrum as much as possible including coupled processes of thermal, hydrological and diffusions in rocks. It presents theoretical formulations, experiments, numerical formulation and examples of applications. Of paramount concern is the long-term response and stability of rock engineering structures, including for instance man-made and natural slopes and underground facilities such as tunnels and powerhouses.

Engineers wishing to build structures on or in rock use the discipline known as rock mechanics. This discipline emerged as a subject in its own right about thirty five years ago, and has developed rapidly ever since. However, rock mechanics is still based to a large extent on analytical techniques that were originally formulated for the mechanical design of structures made from man made materials. The single most important distinction between man-made materials and the natural material rock is that rock contains fractures, of many kinds on many scales; and because the fractures - of whatever kin- represent breaks in the mechanical continuum, they are collectively termed 'discontinuities' . An understanding of the mechanical influence of these discontinuities is essential to all rock engineers. Most of the world is made of rock, and most of the rock near the surface is fractured. The fractures dominate the rock mass geometry, deformation modulus, strength, failure behaviour, permeability, and even the local magnitudes and directions of the in situ stress field. Clearly, an understanding of the presence and mechanics of the discontinuities, both singly and in the rock mass context, is therefore of paramount importance to civil, mining and petroleum engineers. Bearing this in mind, it is surprising that until now there has been no book dedicated specifically to the subject of discontinuity analysis in rock engineering.

This book provides a new, necessary and valuable approach to the consideration of risk in underground engineering projects constructed within rock masses. There are Chapters on uncertainty and risk, rock engineering systems, rock fractures and rock stress, the design of a repository for radioactive waste, plus two major case examples relating to th

This book presents some fundamental concepts behind the basic theories and tools of discrete element methods (DEM), its historical development, and its wide scope of applications in geology, geophysics and rock engineering. Unlike almost all books available on the general subject of DEM, this book includes coverage of both explicit and implicit DEM approaches, namely the Distinct Element Methods and Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) for both rigid and deformable blocks and particle systems, and also the Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) approach for fluid flow and solute transport simulations. The latter is actually also a discrete approach of importance for rock mechanics and rock engineering. In addition, brief introductions to some alternative approaches are also provided, such as percolation theory and Cosserat micromechanics equivalence to particle systems, which often appear hand-in-hand with the DEM in the literature. Fundamentals of the particle mechanics approach using DEM for granular media is also presented. · Presents the fundamental concepts of the discrete models for fractured rocks, including constitutive models of rock fractures and rock masses for stress, deformation and fluid flow · Provides a comprehensive presentation on discrete element methods, including distinct elements, discontinuous deformation analysis, discrete fracture networks, particle mechanics and Cosserat representation of granular media · Features constitutive models of rock fractures and fracture system characterization methods detaiing their significant impacts on the performance and uncertainty of the DEM models

This book provides practicing engineers working in the field of design, construction and monitoring of rock structures such as tunnels and slopes with technical information on how to design, how to excavate and how to monitor the structures during their construction. Based on the long-term engineering experiences of the author, field measurements together with back analyses are presented as the most powerful tools in rock engineering practice. One of the purposes of field measurements is to assess the stability of the rock structures during their construction. However, field measurement results are only numbers unless they are quantitatively interpreted, a process in which back analyses play an important role. The author has developed both the concepts of “critical strain” and of the “anisotropic parameter” of rocks, which can make it possible not only to assess the stability of the structures during their construction, but also to verify the validity of design parameters by the back analysis of field measurement results during the constructions. Based on the back analysis results, the design parameters used at a design stage could be modified if necessary. This procedure is called an “Observational method”, a concept that is entirely different from that of other structures such as bridges and buildings. It is noted that in general, technical books written for practicing engineers mainly focus on empirical approaches which are based on engineers’ experiences. In this book, however, no empirical approaches will be described, instead, all the approaches are based on simple rock mechanics theory. This book is the first to describe an observational method in rock engineering practice, which implies that the potential readers of this book must be practicing engineers working on rock engineering projects.

First published in 1993. This volume is a collection of papers addressing the issue of the failure of rock engineering structures. This phenomenon occurs in different forms depending on the geometry of structure, material properties of intact rock, structure of rock mass, environmental conditions and initial state of stress.