Numerical investigation of the impact of geological discontinuities on the propagation of ground vibrations

Abstract

Blast-induced ground vibrations by a significant amount of explosives may cause many problems for mining slope stability. Geological discontinuities have a significant influence on the transmission of dynamic pressure of detonation and according to their position relative to the slope face may have damaging or useful impacts on the slope stability. In this study, the effect of geological discontinuities was investigated by modelling a slope with geological discontinuities through applying the dynamic pressure in three-dimensional discrete element code (3DEC). The geological discontinuities in four states that generally apperceived in mine slopes are considered. Given the advantages of the pressure decay function defined by some researcher, this type of function was used to develop the pressure-time profile. The peak particle velocities (PPV) values were monitored along an axis by utilization of Fish programming language and the results were used as an indicator to measure the effects. As shown in the discontinuity-free model, PPV empirical models are reliable in rocks lacking discontinuities or tightly jointed rock masses. According to the other results, the empirical models cannot be used for the case where the rock mass contains discontinuities with any direction or dip. With regard to PPVs, when the direction of discontinuities is opposite to that of the slope face, the dynamic pressure of detonation is significantly damped toward the slope direction at the surface of discontinuities. On the other hand, when the discontinuities are horizontal, the dynamic pressure of detonation affects the rock mass to a large distance.