Assessment of excavation damaged zone using a micromechanics model

Abstract

Abstract It is well known that acoustic emission (AE) and microseismic (MS) events are indicators of rock fracturing or damage as the rock is brought to failure at high stress. By capturing the microseismic events, underground excavation induced rock mass degradation or damage can be located. The use of microseismic method has been shown as a valuable tool in a number of nuclear waste repository research programs to monitor the extent of the excavation damaged zone (EDZ), but most of the works are limited to a qualitative assessment. This paper presents a study on the quantification of the degree of damage, in terms of crack density calculated from the crack length, and the extent, in terms of crack density distribution, from microseismic event monitoring data. The approach builds on the finding that a realistic crack size corresponding to a microseismic event can be established by applying a tensile cracking model instead of the traditional shear model, commonly used in earthquake data analysis. It can be shown that brittle rock failure is the result of tensile crack initiation, propagation, accumulation, and interaction. Tensile stress can be generated in a confined rock with heterogeneous material properties. When a crack is formed by tensile cracking in this fashion, its orientation tends to become parallel to the direction of maximum compressive stress. A method is developed to take microseismic event monitoring data as input to determine the damage state and the extent of the EDZ by crack distribution. Based on the crack orientation and crack density information, the rock is modeled by a micro-mechanics based constitutive model which considers the anisotropic material properties. Numerical examples are presented using field monitoring data from a tunnel in granite to demonstrate how microseismicity can be quantitatively linked to dynamic rock mass properties.