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LONG-TERM BEHAVIOR OF DIFFERENT ROCK TYPES BASED ON LABORATORY TESTING
Session: Rock Mechanics and Engineering Geology II / Mécanique des roches et ingénierie géologique II
Chrysothemis Paraskevopoulou, PhD Candidate (Canada)
Mark Diederichs, Professor at Department of Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada (Canada)
Matthew Perras, Institute of Geology, ETH (Switzerland)
Over the past few decades’ significant interest from rock engineers has been given to the understanding of the long-term strength and the susceptibility to damage of different rock types. The long-term behaviour of underground openings, in general, is usually associated with time-dependent deformations. Tunnel construction can be very challenging due to the difficulties in making reliable predictions at the preliminary stages of the design of a project. It is necessary to understand the time-dependent mechanisms of the host rock and the gradual development of the irreversible deformations around underground openings. Excessive deformations can take place and cause severe damage both to the support system that can result in construction delays and cost overruns. The latter could be more challenging in the case of the design and construction of nuclear waste repositories where the generally accepted life time of such engineering projects is in the order of one million years. During time creep and strength degradation phenomena can take place and govern the material behaviour. This study tries to give more insight into the long-term behaviour of brittle rocks through a series of unconfined static load tests (constant loading) performed on Jura Limestone. The results are compared to reported data from literature to review different rock types as an attempt to create and establish a database.
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