il

190 Testing techniques

q - quantity of water
required to main-
tain constant head

Rest water level

Casing

Constant head test

Figure 11.14 Borehole permeability testing (after Hoek and Bray, 1977).

ground facility are formed to the desired size and loaded using hydraulic
flat jacks or by further excavation, using the excavation periphery for
reaction.
Traditional methods of estimating permeability are summarized in Hoek
and Bray (1977).These include the borehole falling-head test, the borehole
recharge test and the borehole packer permeability test, as illustrated in
Fig. 11.14.Although such estimations of the permeability suffer from all the
deficiencies described in Chapter 9, the tests can be useful as indices. If,
however, the permeability is required at the REV size, then one method is
to isolate a large underground excavation, circulate air through it, and
measure the change in air moisture content.
We discussed stress measurement in Chapter 4, with devices for
determining in situ stress being discussed in Section 4.3. As an exciting
analogue to the large-scale deformation and permeability tests, large in situ
stress determination tests are now being attempted by shaft and tunnel
‘undercoring’, in which an excavation is driven through an instrumented
zone of rock and the stress back-calculated from the measured responses.
This is one way to deal with the REV problem, but there are limitations to
the number of such tests that can be conducted in estimating the stress over
the region of a large structure such as a hydroelectric scheme or
radioactive waste repository.
Because of the difficulties associated with rock mass testing which we
have highlighted here, the subject is one of the most important research
areas in rock mechanics and rock engineering. There are several surface
and underground facilities around the world where tests are being
conducted to solve the basic problem of rock mass characterization. The
Underground Research Laboratory (URL)at Pinawa, Canada, operated by
the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, has had an on-going research
programme addressing these problems for the last decade. More stress
measurements have been conducted at URL (at least 800 tests) than at any
other single site in the world, and extensive work is being conducted on
permeability estimation. We await the conclusions of these and other such
programmes before recommendations can be made on ’the way ahead.