In this paper an attempt is made to offer insights into local slope failure mechanisms from the perspective of hydrogeology. The hypothesis examined envisages that the hydraulic conductivity distribution in a weathered profile includes a relatively high hydraulic conductivity zone associated with the jointed rock mass near rockhead. There is evidence locally for such a condition. The groundwate...

The main rock mass classification systems make use of similar rock mass parameters. Due to lack of comprehensive estimation systems, determining the real specifications of jointed rocks faces some difficulties. A vast number of parameters with various degrees of impact are involved in such definitions. Combination impact of all the effective parameters is to be figured out in order to come up w...

Fluid flow in jointed rock mass with impermeable matrix is often controlled by joint properties, including aperture, orientation, spacing, persistence and etc. On the other hand, since the rock mass is made of heterogeneous and anisotropic natural materials, geometric properties of joints may have dispersed values. One of the most powerful methods for simulation of stochastic nature of geometri...

Uniaxial compressive and Brazilian tensile strengths (UCS and BTS) of rocks are considered important properties in the design of most the geotechnical projects that interact with rock such as slope stability and underground excavation. Measuring UCS and BTS using standard laboratory tests are time consuming, tedious and expensive. Moreover, it requires a large number of well-prepared rock cores...

An efficient and systematic methodology for the kinematic analysis of geared robot Ž . manipulators GRMs with a jointed unit is presented. It is shown that, by decomposing mechanical transmission lines of a GRM into serially connected jointed and disjointed units, kinematic relation between local inputs and local outputs of admissible jointed units can be systematically formulated. Accordingly,...

This paper demonstrates the ability of Shear Strength Reduction (SSR) analysis based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) to model the scale effects of discontinuity networks on the stability and failure mechanisms of slopes in blocky rock masses. Through three examples, it shows how these mechanisms depend on joint network geometry and change with increasing slope height. Introduction Scale Effe...

Phenomenological equations (with coeecients to be determined by speciied experiments) for the poroelastic behavior of a dual porosity medium are formulated and the coeecients in these linear equations are identiied. The generalization from the single porosity case increases the number of independent coeecients for volume deformation from three to six for an isotropic applied stress. The physica...

Original scientific paper To analyse the influence of joint angle, number and spacing on the strength and acoustic emission (AE) characteristics of rock mass, the uniaxial compression model of rock specimens was established using the micro particle flow PFC2D software platform. The intact rock parameters were determined via trial and error, joints with different angles, numbers and spacing were...