A great deal of effort has been made to characterize the nature of the discontinuities of the Yucca Mountain proposed nuclear waste repository. Discontinuity sets were identified, using orientation only as the basis of cluster analysis. Other discontinuity characteristics such as lithology fracture frequency, continuity, roughness, aperture, and infilling have been analyzed, but separate and di...

Abstract Stereographic projection has been used in Rock Engineering for decades to represent rock mass discontinuities graphical form and carry out further stability analysis. Currently, there are computer programs available this purpose. The objective of technical note is present some closed expressions related stereographic projections such as the prediction a possible joint set. These soluti...

This paper presents ongoing research in improvement of analytical tools for the characterization of rock mass structure from oriented borehole discontinuity data. Using automated multivariate cluster analysis and the “three dimensional stereonet” provides for fast and objective characterization of oriented core discontinuity data. Improvements to the CYL software include three new methods of cl...

In structural geology it is often assumed that folds are cylindrical. However, most structures are conical to some degree. Due to the lack of software capable of accurately estimating the best fit cone from a set of oriented data, we developed a Mathematica application capable of (1) plotting oriented data (lines and planes) on an equal area stereonet, (2) calculating the orientation matrix, th...

This paper presents the results of ongoing research on the characterization of rock mass structure from discontinuity data. Multivariate clustering analysis represents a relatively recent development in characterizing the structure of rock masses. Multivariate clustering allows characterization of discontinuities into subsets according to multiple parameters, such as orientation, spacing, and r...

This paper describes a new and cost effective method of analyzing hard rock discontinuities from oriented core bore hole data. This algorithm uses multivariate cluster analysis to group discontinuities (joints) into sets based on orientation and spatial position (spacing) along the bore hole, and to display the data in a three dimensional stereonet. Although drift or surface exposure mapping da...