successful application of a tbm in a project requires investigating both the ground conditions and the machine and backup system design features. prediction of the machine performance is very important as it has a big effect on the duration of the project and the costs. in this respect, both penetration rate and advance rate must be estimated. utilization factor, which depends on the type of op...

Original scientific paper Rock burst is a common serious geological hazard in underground engineering, which seriously affects the progress of projects. The mechanism of rock burst can be explained by the distribution law of rock fragments and its fractal characteristics. A simulation experiment of rock burst was conducted with the granite samples under a biaxial loading machine system to analy...

Rapid development of engineering activities expands through a variety of rock engineering processes such as drilling, blasting, mining and mineral processing. These activities require rock dynamic fracture mechanics method to characterize the rock behavior. Dynamic fracture toughness is an important parameter for the analysis of engineering structures under dynamic loading. Several experimental...

R. Zhu,1 X. N. Liu,1 G. L. Huang,1,* H. H. Huang,2 and C. T. Sun3 1Department of Systems Engineering, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas 72204, USA 2Department of Engineering Science and Ocean Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan 3School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA (Received 1 June 2012...

The prediction of rock mass behavior is an important task in many engineering projects, as the behavior of rock masses can be controlled by the presence of discontinuities. Being able to map the structure of a rock mass is crucial to understanding its potential behavior. This understanding can positively impact the safety and efficiency of an engineering project. In this research, rock masses w...

In underground tunnels or caverns, time-dependent deformation or failure of rock mass, such as extending cracks, gradual rock falls, etc., are a costly irritant and a major safety concern if the time-dependent damage of surrounding rock is serious. To understand the damage evolution of rock mass in underground engineering, an in situ experimental testing was carried out in a large belowground t...

One of the key outcomes of blasting in mines is found to be rock fragmentation which profoundly affects downstream expenses. In fact, size prediction of rock fragmentation is the first leap towards the optimization of blasting design parameters. This paper makes an attempt to present a model to predict rock fragmentation using Mutual Information (MI) in Meydook copper mine. Ten parameters are c...

Drilling and blasting have numerous applications in the civil and mining engineering. Due to the two major components of rock masses, namely the intact rock matrix and the discontinuities, their behavior is a complicated process to be analyzed. The purpose of this work is to investigate the effects of the geomechanical and geometrical parameters of rock and discontinuities on the rock mass blas...