Opening effect on mechanical behaviour of rock brick

Abstract

Openings in rock play a significant role in the performance of rock related structures. The well-established knowledge in this area can contribute to the engineering practices, for example, underground space design, planning and optimisation in Civil and Mining Engineering and wellbore stability in Drilling Engineering, among others (Gui et al. 2017). In this paper, a numerical study on the effect of non-banded openings, i.e., circular opening, on the rock mechanical behaviour is performed using UDEC. It is revealed that the proposed simulation method can reproduce reasonably the crack initiation and propagation, and predict well the change of the mechanical behaviour due to the openings.