Proposing Triangulation-Based Measures for Rock Fracture Roughness

Excerpt

Small changes in rock fracture characteristics may lead to significant changes in the calculated safety factor of rock structures, including different types of surface and underground excavations (Babanouri et al. 2011). Among the influencing parameters, the morphology of rock fracture surfaces is of particular importance in the mechanical and hydraulic behavior of rock masses. Therefore, many methods have been proposed to quantify the roughness of rock discontinuities. Most of the available methods summarize the surface roughness in terms of empirical parameters (Barton and Choubey 1977; Beer et al. 2002), statistical parameters (Tse and Cruden 1979; Yang et al. 2001; Babanouri et al. 2013), or fractal parameters (Odling 1994; Kulatilake et al. 1997; Babanouri et al. 2013), which are usually calculated for two-dimensional profiles of the fracture surface. However, the study of rock fracture roughness can be conducted through a comprehensive three-dimensional (3D) modeling of the surface geometry (Marache et al. 2002; Grasselli et al. 2002; Grasselli 2006; Saito and Grasselli 2010). For this purpose, some attempts have been made to describe and reconstruct the morphology of rock discontinuities using geostatistical tools (Marache et al. 2002; Saito and Grasselli 2010; Babanouri and Karimi Nasab 2015). Grasselli introduced a three-dimensional measure of roughness based on analyzing the triangular irregular network (TIN) of the fracture surface which realistically reflects the roughness features (Grasselli et al. 2002; Grasselli 2006). …