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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.
List of contents
1 Introduction to discontinuities.- 2 Measurement of discontinuity characteristics.- 3 Discontinuity orientation.- 4 Discontinuity frequency.- 5 Discontinuity spacing.- 6 Discontinuity size.- 7 Stresses on discontinuities.- 8 Analysis of rigid blocks.- 9 Discontinuities and rock strength.- 10 Discontinuities and rock deformability.- 11 Fluid flow in discontinuities.- Appendices.- A Hemispherical projection methods.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 Plotting and un-plotting lines.- A.3 Plotting and un-plotting planes.- A.4 The angle between lines.- A.5 Intersecting planes.- B Statistics and probability density.- B.1 Populations, samples and statistics.- B.2 Distributions.- B.3 The mean and other moments.- B.4 Generation of random values.- B.4.1 Uniform distribution.- B.4.2 Negative exponential distribution.- B.4.3 Normal and lognormal distributions.- B.4.4 Fisher distribution.- C Rock mass classification.- C.1 Rock Mass Rating System for geomechanics classification.- C.2 The Q-system for rock classification and support design.- D Analysis of forces.- D.1 Vectorial representation of a force.- D.2 Hemispherical projection representation of a force.- D.3 Resultant of forces.- D.4 Decomposition of forces.- D.4.1 Algebraic method.- D.4.2 Graphical method.- E Stress analysis.- E.1 Three-dimensional stress.- E.2 Stress transformation.- E.3 Principal stresses.- References.- Answers to exercises.
Report
Using over 100 worked examples and exercises which require only an elementary knowledge of mathematics, statistics and mechanics, the basic concepts of discontinuity analysis for rock analysis are explained. - IMM Abstracts
