Effect of a fault and weak plane on the stability of a tunnel in rock—a scaled model test and numerical analysis

Abstract

The characteristics of deep rock mass, such as the elastic resilience, creep, stress release, expansion, dilation and the long-term strength, are of great importance to the rock mass deformation and failure mechanism. However, there is not yet a constitutive model which can describe all these properties of the deep rock mass. The proposed dynamic failure constitutive model in this paper analyzes the elastic resilience and the dilation deformation of the surrounding rock mass during the unloading process, and the pre-peak (elastic and internal frictional hardening stages) and the post-peak(softening and residual failure stages) stages are also taken into account. A computational software has been coded based on the dynamic explicit finite element method. The constitutive model has also been implemented into this software. The complete stress–strain relation using the new model in numerical unloading test was obtained. The sensitivity of the parameters of the dynamic failure constitutive model has also been analyzed. Based on the long-term monitored data for Zhuji coal mine, the parameter inversion of the two different sections of the piebald mudstone has been conducted with the nonlinear least square method. Further, the whole process simulation of the deformation of Zhuji coal mine has been performed with the inversed parameters. A high degree of agreement on the deformation has been achieved by the comparison between the calculated and the measured data in actual engineering project.