Deformation of Healed Rock Joints Under Tension: Experimental Study and Empirical Model

Excerpt

Joint deformability is of fundamental importance for rock engineering, because it dominates the mechanical and hydraulic behaviour of jointed rock masses (Hungr and Coates 1978; Bandis et al. 1983; Hossaini et al. 2014). Reliable characterization of joint deformability under different loading conditions should be incorporated into an applicable constitutive model to describe the mechanical and hydraulic behaviours of jointed rock masses (Jade and Sitharam 2003; Jing and Stephansson 2007). Some joints, e.g., incipient joints or healed joints, can bear significant tensile loading before failure (Shang et al. 2016), and the tensile behaviour of rock joints is crucial for the stability of jointed rock masses (Diederichs and Kaiser 1999; Ghazvinian et al. 2012; Shang et al. 2016). However, joint deformability under tension is still not yet fully elucidated, and no practical models for joint deformability under tension have been established. …