STIFFNESS CHARACTERISTICS OF SOFT ROCK JOINTS

Abstract

The existence of one or several sets of discontinuities in a rock mass creates anisotropy in its response to loading and unloading. It is very much essential to understand the deformability of these rocks discontinuities. This is helpful for design of various structures and their foundations like tunnels, foundations of heavy structures like dams and tall buildings, abutments of arch dams and bridges and many underground structures. These deformation properties of rock joints can be described by stiffness characteristics. These characteristics are namely shear stiffness and normal stiffness. Shear stiffness of a rock joint can be estimated by conducting the direct shear test and the normal stiffness can be evaluated from the direct compression test. These stiffness characteristics are required to understand deformation in practice and also the same is required as an input by professional software for various analysis and design. In this present work, an attempt has been made to predict...