Structural Geology Understanding of Rock Fractures for Improved Rock Mechanics Characterization
Field studies show that although the principal agents of stress generation in the crust (overburden and plate motion) often give rise to regionally uniform stress fields, a variety of factors conspire to generate stress heterogeneities on all scales. Fractures are particularly important in this regard and the manner in which they disturb the stress field within a fractured rock mass questions the significance of stress determinations made at points within such a rock. In addition these field studies indicate the way in which fracture networks in rocks are built up by the superposition of different stress regimes over geological time. They confirm that fractures interact and that as a result the networks have a very specific topology which exerts considerable control of the rock properties and which therefore must be considered when attempting to numerically model and predict the properties of a fractured rock mass. When the scale of the fracture network is much smaller than the rock volume of interest, then if the appropriate fracture network geometry and fracture properties are used, ‘hbulk’ properties can be determined which adequately describe the behaviour of the rock mass. In other situations the properties are likely to be controlled by a local feature such as a specific shear zone or fracture zone within the network.
John W Cosgrove
The Department of Earth Science & Engineering Royal School of Mines Imperial College London SW7 2AZ United Kingdom
国际会议
香港
英文
1-7
2009-05-19（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）