Modeling mechanical layering effects on stability of underground openings in jointed sedimentary rocks

Stability of shallow karstic caverns in blocky rock masses

“…Another test for our semi-empirical stability boundary for shallow karstic caverns is the case of Zedekiah cave reported by us elsewhere [19]. Zedekiah cave is in fact an old stone quarry below the old city of Jerusalem dated back to the Roman period.…”

“…[17,18]] and numerical analyses [e.g. [19,20]]. Geotechnical stability problems ensue when the cover height is nearly as large as the excavation span, or even smaller.…”

Detection of contacts between three-dimensional polyhedral blocks for discontinuous deformation analysis

“…With continuous modifications and improvements, twodimensional (2-D) DDA has been more efficient and suitable to cover practical engineering problems of rockfall, 4-7 landslide, [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] tunneling and mining, [17][18][19][20][21] cavern and underground opening, [22][23][24][25][26][27] masonry structure, [28][29][30] fracture propagation, 31,32 rock blasting [33][34][35] and many others. [36][37][38][39][40][41][42] However, the applications of 2-D DDA are inappropriate to many practical problems because the majority of discontinuities are not always perpendicular to the cross-section of the model.…”

DEM modelling of a jointed rock beam with emphasis on interface properties

“…To account for the influence of jointing more directly, several investigators have used discontinuum analysis (i.e. the DEM or discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) (Hatzor & Benary, 1998;Tsesarsky & Hatzor, 2006;Tsesarsky & Talesnick, 2007;Alejano et al, 2008;Bakun-Mazor et al, 2009;Barla et al, 2010;Hatzor et al, 2010) but, until now, these studies have been limited to simple contact models between rock joints. Talesnick et al (2007) measured the horizontal thrust and the vertical deflection of a voussoir beam subject to increasing levels of gravitational acceleration.…”