Morphological classification method and data-driven estimation of the joint roughness coefficient by consideration of two-order asperity

Abstract The roughness of the joint surface plays a significant role in evaluating the shear strength of rock. The waviness (first-order) and unevenness (second-order) of natural joints have different effects on the characterization of joint surface roughness. To accurately quantify the influence of the two-order asperity on the joint roughness coefficient (JRC) prediction of joint surface profile curve, the optimal sampling interval of the asperity was determined through the change of the R p {R}_{{\rm{p}}} value of the joint surface profile curve. The separation of the two-order asperity of 48 joint surface profile curves was completed at the optimal sampling interval, and morphological parameters of the asperity such as i ave {i}_{{\rm{ave}}} , R max {R}_{{\rm{\max }}} , and R p {R}_{{\rm{p}}} were counted from three aspects: asperity angle of the profile curve, asperity degree, and the trace length. Based on the statistical results of the morphological parameters considering the two-order asperity, the new nonlinear prediction models were proposed. The results showed that the curve slope mutation point SI = 2 mm is the optimal separation distance of the two-order asperity of the joint surface profile curve. The refined separation method that considers the waviness and unevenness of morphological parameters can characterize the detailed morphological features of the joint surface in more dimensions. The support vector regression (SVR) and random forest (RF) models that take into account a two-order asperity separated results have higher accuracy than traditional models. The prediction accuracy has improved by 7–8% in SVR model compared with SVR(SO) and RF(SO). The SVR nonlinear model that considering separation of two-orders of joint surface roughness is more suitable for the prediction of JRC.