Chapter 1

Introduction
Some knowledge of rock mechanics is vital for civil engineers although it is only since
about 1960 that rock mechanics has come to be recognized as adiscipline worthy of a
special course of lectures in an engineering program.
That recognition is an inevitable consequence of new engineering activities in rock,
including complex underground installations, deep cuts for spillways, andenormous
open pit mines. Rock mechanics deals with the properties of rockand the special
methodology required for design of rock-related components of engineering schemes.
Rock, like soil, is sufficiently distinct from other engi- neering materials that the process
of “design” in rock is really special.
In dealing with a reinforced concrete structure, for example, the engineer first calculates
the external loads to be applied, prescribes the material on the basis of the strength
required (exerting control to insure that strength is guaranteed), and accordingly
determines the structural geometry. In rock structures, on the other hand, the applied
loads are often less significant than the forces deriving from redistribution of initial
stresses. Then, since rock structures like under- ground openings possess many possible
failure modes, the determination of material "strength” requires as much judgment as
measurement. Finally, the geometry of the structure is at least partly ordained by
geological structure and not completely within the designer's freedoms. For these
reasons, rock me- chanics includes some aspects not considered in other fields of
applied mechan-ics-geological selection of sites rather than control of material
properties, measurement of initial stresses, and analysis, through graphics and model
stud- ies, of multiple modes of failure. The subject of rock mechanics is therefore closely
allied with geology and geological engineering.

1.1 Fields of Application of Rock Mechanics

Our involvement with rock in the most intimate terms extends backward far into
prehistory. Arrowheads, common tools, vessels, fortifications, houses, even tunnels
were built of or in rock. Constructions and sculptures, such as the

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 Abu Simbel Temple in Egypt and the pyramids, testify to a refined technique
for selecting, quarrying, cutting, and working rocks. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, great tunnels were driven for mine ventilation and drain-
age, water supply, canals, and rail transport.
In this century the great sculptures on Mount Rushmore (Figure 1.1) dem-
onstrated to the world the enduring resolve of great figures and well-selected
granite alike, even while engineers were turning to other materials. In this age,
when materials engineers can concoct alloys and plastics to survive bizarre and
demanding special requirements, rock work still occupies the energies of indus-
try and the imagination of engineers; questions concerning the properties and
behavior of rock figure prominently in engineering for structures, transporta-
tion routes, defense works, and energy supply.
Figure 1.1 Sculpting of Roosevelt and Lincoln in Mount Rushmore. Gutzon
Borglum selected the site and adjusted the sculpture to fit its imperfections, even
down to the last inch. The weathered rock was removed via controlled blasting
with dynamite, the hole spacing and charge becoming progressively finer as the
final surface was approached. The last inches were removed by very close drilling
and chiseling. (Photo by Charles d'Emery. Reproduced with permission of Lincoln
Borglum and K. C. Den Dooven. From Mount Rushmore, the Story Behind the
Scenery, K. C. Publications (1978).)

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 Table 1.1 sketches some of the components of engineering works that involve rock mechanics to
a significant degree. Of the many occupations of engineers in planning, design, and construction
of works, nine have been sin- gled out in this table because they are often significantly
dependent upon rock mechanics input: evaluation of geological hazards in quantitative terms,
selec- tion and preparation of rock materials, evaluation of cuttability or drillability of rock and
design of cutting and drilling tools, layout and selection of types of structures, analysis of rock
deformations, analysis of rock stability, supervi- sion and control of blast procedures, design of
support systems, and hydraulic fracturing. These activities are pursued in somewhat different
styles according to the nature of the engineering work.

Engineering structures placed on the surface of the ground normally do not require study of
rock properties and behavior unless the structure is very large, or special, or unless the rock has
unusual properties. Of course, the engineer is always on the lookout for geological hazards, such
as active faults or landslides that might affect siting. The engineering geologist has the
responsibility to discover the hazards; rock mechanics can sometimes help reduce the risk. For
example, loose sheets of exfoliating granite pose a threat to buildings near the feet of cliffs in
Rio de Janeiro. The rock engineer may be called upon to design a bolting system, or a remedial
controlled blast. In the case of light structures like private homes, the only rock mechanics input
would concern testing the poten- tial swellability of shale foundations. However, in the case of
very large build-ings, bridges, factories, etc., tests may be required to establish the elastic and
delayed settlement of the rock under the applied loads. Over karstic limestone, or mined-out
coal seams at depth, considerable investigation and specially designed foundations may be
required to insure structural stability.

An aspect of engineering for tall buildings that involves rock mechanics is control of blasting so
that the vibrations do not damage neighboring structures or irritate local residents (Figure 1.2).
In cities, foundations of new buildings may lie extremely close to older structures. Also,
temporary excavations may require tieback systems to prevent sliding or raveling of rock blocks.

The most challenging surface structures with respect to rock mechanics are large dams,
especially arch and buttress types that impose high stresses on rock foundations or abutments,
simultaneously with the force and action of water. In addition to concern about active faults in
the foundation, the hazards of possible landslides into the reservoir have to be carefully
evaluated; very fresh is the memory of the Vajont catastrophe in Italy when a massive slide
displaced the water over the high Vajont arch dam and killed more than 2000 people
downstream. Rock mechanics is also involved in the choice of mate- rials—rip-rap for protection
of embankment slopes against wave erosion, con -crete aggregate, various filter materials, and
rock fill. Rock testing may be required to determine the durability and strength properties of
such materials. Since the different types of dams exert very different stress regimes on the

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 Figure 1.2 Excavation in rock very close to existing buildings is a frequent
problem for construction in cities. (Photo courtesy of A. J. Hendron, Jr.
Manhattan schist, Hunter College, New York.)
rock, rock mechanics assists in confirming the type of dam for the site. Then
analysis of rock deformations, and of rock stability, form an important part of
the engineering design studies.
In the case of concrete dams, deformability values assigned to the rocks of
the foundations and abutments, through laboratory and in situ tests, are inte-
grated in model studies or numerical analyses of concrete stresses. The safety
of large and small rock wedges under the dam are calculated by statics. If
necessary, cable or rock bolt support systems are designed to prestress the
rock or the dam/rock contact.
Blasting for rock cleanup has to be engineered to preserve the integrity of
the remaining rock and to limit the vibrations of neighboring structures to
acceptable levels. At the Grand Coulee Third Powerhouse site, blasting was
performed for the headrace channels very close to the existing Grand Coulee
dam, without any possibility for lowering the reservoir. Also, a rock "coffer-
dam" was constructed by leaving a core of solid granite unexcavated until the
completion of the powerhouse excavation some years later, this was accom-
plished by using controlled blasting technique on the upstream and downstream
limits of the blast adjacent to the cofferdam.
Transportation engineering also calls upon rock mechanics in many ways.
Design of cut slopes for highways, railways, canals, pipelines, and penstocks
may involve testing and analysis of the system of discontinuities. Considerable

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 cost savings are possible if the orientation of the right of way can be adjusted

based on the rock mechanics studies, but this is not always practical. The

decision to place portions of such routes underground is partly determined by

judgments about the rock conditions and relative costs of open cuts and tun-

nels. Savings can be realized in penstock steel by assigning a portion of the

stress to the rock if the penstock is placed in a tunnel; in that case rock tests can

determine rock properties for the design. Sometimes penstocks can be left

unlined; rock stress measurements may then be required to assure that leakage

will not be disastrous. In urban areas, transportation routes at the surface may

have to accept subvertical slopes because of the high values of land, and,

accordingly, permanently stable slopes will have to be maintained by artificial

supports. Considerable testing and analysis of the rock may be justified to

provide an interpretational framework for instruments provided to monitor

long-term safety.

Surface excavations for other purposes may also demand rock mechanics

input in control of blasting, selection of cut slopes and location of safety

benches, and provision for support. In the case of open pit mines, which rely on

economical excavation for profitable operation, considerable study may be

warranted in choosing appropriate rock slopes. Statistical methods of dealing

with the many variables are being developed to enable the mine planner to

determine mining costs in the most useful terms. Since these mines cannot

afford generous factors of safety, they often support thorough monitoring of

rock deformation and stress. Normally, artificial supports are not provided

because the costs would be prohibitive, but rock bolts, retaining structures,

drains, and other measures are sometimes required at the sites of power struc-

tures and at crushers or conveyor belts within the pit. Spillway cuts for dams

also can attain impressive dimensions and demand rock mechanics attention

(Fig. 1.3). Such cuts assume a value far greater than their cost since failure at

an unfortunate time could allow overtopping of the dam; even so, the costs of

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 major spillway cuts can rival the cost of even a large dam and thus such
excavations can be considered engineering structures in their own right. Rock
mechanics affects the decision on whether to locate spillways in open cut or in
tunnels.
Underground excavations call upon the discipline of rock mechanics in
many ways. In mining, the design of cutters and drills can be tailored to the
rock conditions, which are determined by suitable laboratory tests. This also
applied to tunneling with moles or tunneling machines. A major decision of
mining is whether to attempt to maintain the openings while removing the ore,
or instead to let the rock deform. The rock condition and state of stress is
fundamentally important in reaching this decision correctly. In stable mining
methods, the dimensions of pillars, rooms, and other rock components are
based upon rock mechanics studies using numerical analysis or applicable the-
ory, and calling into play thorough rock testing programs. In the case of unsta-

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 Figure 1.3 The flip bucket for the side-hill spillway
for Chivor rock-fill dam, Colombia. Note the road-
way and access tunnel in the lower left and the
drainage tunnel under the flip bucket. (Owner,
I.S.A.; Engineer, Ingetec, Ltda.)
ble mining methods, the layout of haulageways and "draw points" is based
upon studies aiming to minimize dilution of ore with waste rock and to optimize
efficiency.
Underground chambers are now being used for a variety of purposes other
than transportation and mining. Some of these applications are demanding new
kinds of data and special technology. Storage of liquefied natural gas in under-
ground chambers requires determination of rock properties under conditions of
extreme cold and analysis of heat transfer in the rock. Storage of oil and gas in
mined chambers (Figure 1.4) requires a leakproof underground environment.
Any large underground chamber, regardless of its special requirements, should

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 Figure 1.4 An underground chamber for storage of pe-
troleum products in Norway. A storage facility consists
of a number of such chambers. (Photo courtesy of Tor
Brekke.)
be stable essentially without support and this depends upon the state of stress
and the pattern and properties of discontinuities. Underground hydroelectric
power plants, which offer advantages over surface power plants in mountain-
ous terrain, feature very large machine halls (e.g., 25-m span) and numerous
other openings in a complex three-dimensional arrangement (see Fig. 7.1). The
orientation and layout of these openings depend almost entirely upon rock
mechanics and geological considerations. Blasting, design of supports, and
most other engineering aspects of such schemes depend markedly upon rock
conditions; therefore rock mechanics is a basic tool. The military is interested
in underground openings to create invulnerable facilities. Rock dynamics has
figured prominently in design of such schemes, since the security of the open-
ings must be maintained in the face of enormous ground shock pressures. The

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 military has sponsored special prototype tests to failure that have advanced the
knowledge of rock properties and behavior and of rock/structure interactions.
Rock mechanics is also important in the field of energy development (in addition to the
hydroelectric works already mentioned). In petroleum engineer- ing, design of drilling
bits depends upon rock properties; bit wear is one of the major elements of cost. Rock
mechanics studies are being directed toward solving the problems associated with deep
drilling, to allow recovery fromgreater depths. In shales, salts, and certain other rocks,
depth limitations are created by flowage of the rock and rapid closure of the hole. A
laboratory has been built in Salt Lake City (Terra Tek Drilling Laboratory) to allow full-
scale simulation of drilling at depths up to 20,000 feet and at temperatures up to 340°C.
The petroleum industry pioneered the use of hydraulically induced frac- tures to
increase reservoir yield. Hydraulic fracturing is now a standard reser- voir operation. It is
also being investigated as a mechanism for exchanging the earth's heat as a source of
geothermal energy in dry, hot rocks. In the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory scheme,
under full-scale field investigation, a hydraulic fracture circulates cold water into hot
rock; the heated water is returned to the surface through a second drill hole intersecting
the top of the fracture. In the nuclear energy field, in addition to the problems of
constructing the surface and/or underground facilities in rock and the elaborate
precautions required by licensing agencies to insure that there are no active faults or
other geological hazards on site, the industry is burdened with large quantities of highly
toxic, long-lived radioactive wastes. The current plan is to isolate these wastes in
stainless steel canisters by emplacement in specially mined cavities in deposits of rock
salt and perhaps in granite, basalt, tuff or other rock types. Salt was selected because of
its relatively high heat conductivity together with general water tightness since fractures
tend to be absent or healed. The rock will assume temperatures of approximately 200°C
after emplacement of the canisters.
New applications for rock mechanics are appearing with great rapidity. Exploration and
development of extraterrestrial space, prediction of earth-quakes, solution mining,
compressed air storage in underground chambers, and other exotic fields are calling on
further development of rock technology.
Meanwhile, we are still not completely in command of the essential ingredients for
rational design in some of the more mundane applications mentioned previ- ously .
This is because of the special nature of rock, which renders it different and perhaps
more difficult to deal with than other engineering materials.

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 properties), linear, and elastic. Rocks can be nonideal in a number of ways. First, they
are seldom truly continuous, because pores or fissures are usual. Interconnected pores,
approximately equidimensional cavities, are found be-tween the grains of sedimentary
rocks. Isolated vugs of other origins are found in volcanic rocks and soluble carbonate
rocks. Since the capacity of rocks to store and transmit fluids is largely dependent upon
the behavior of these voids, a special theory has been developed, primarily by workers
in petroleum engi- neering, to deal with the deformations, stresses, and water pressures
in porous rocks. Microfissures are small planar cracks common in hard rocks that have
undergone internal deformation; they occur as intracrystalline and crystal boundary
cracks. A fissured rock is like a test specimen that has been loaded into the cracking
region (i.e., that has been damaged). The behavior of the network of fissures is as
important or even more vital with regard to rock properties than the mineralogic
composition itself. Collectively, fissures and pores do the following: they create
nonlinear load/deformation response, espe- cially at low stress levels; they reduce the
tensile strength (especially fissures); they create stress dependency in materials
properties; they produce variability and scatter in test results; and they introduce a
scale effect into predictions of behavior.
A related nonideality of most rocks is the presence of macrodisconti-nuities. Regular
cracks and fractures are usual at shallow depths beneath the surface and some persist
to depths of thousands of meters. Joints, bedding-plane partings, minor faults, and
other recurrent planar fractures radically alter the behavior of rock in place from that
predictable on the basis of testing intact samples, even though the latter may possess
fissures. The mechanics of discon- tinuous rocks is especially relevant to engineers of
surface structures, surface excavations, and shallow underground excavations. Indeed, it
was the move- ment of a block bounded by faults and joints that undermined the
Malpasset Arch Dam in 1959 (Figure 1.5).
The effect of a single fracture in a rock mass is to lower the tensile strength nearly to
zero in the direction perpendicular to the fracture plane, and to restrict the shear
strength in the direction parallel to the fracture plane. If the joints are not randomly
distributed (and they almost never are) then the effect is to create pronounced
anisotropy of strength, as well as of all other properties in the rock mass. For example,
the strength of a foundation loaded obliquely to the bedding may be less than one-half
of the strength when the load is applied perpendicular or parallel to the bedding.
Anisotropy is common in many rocks even without discontinuous structure because of
preferred orientations of min- eral grains or directional stress history. Foliation and
schistosity make schists, slates, and many other metamorphic rocks highly directional in
their deforma- bility, strength, and other properties. Bedding makes shales, thin-bedded
sand- stones and limestones, and other common sedimentary rocks highly aniso- tropic.
Also, even rock specimens apparently free from bedding structures, such as thick-
bedded sandstones and limestones, may prove to have directional
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 Figure 1.5 A view of the left abutment of Malpas-
set arch dam after its failure. The movement of a
wedge delimited by discontinuity surfaces, one of
which forms the newly exposed rock surface on
the abutment, brought on the rupture of the con-
crete arch.
properties because they were subjected to unequal principal stresses as they
were gradually transformed from sediment into rock. Finally, any fissured rock
that maintains unequal initial stresses will be anisotropic because its properties
are greatly influenced by the state of stress across the fissures; they are one
material when the fissures are closed, and another when the fissures are opened
or sheared.
We can discuss a "mechanics of rocks" in these chapters but such a
discussion must be broad in scope if it is to have general value because the term
“rock” includes a great variety of material types. Granite can behave in a

brittle, elastic manner, up to confining pressures of hundreds of megapascals'

(MPa), while carbonate rocks become plastic at moderate pressures and flow
like clay. Compaction shales and friable sandstones are weakened by immer-
sion in water. Gypsum and rock salt are inclined to behave plastically at rela-
tively low confining pressures and are highly soluble.
Despite all these problems with rock as an engineering material, it is possi-
ble to support engineering decisions with meaningful tests, calculations, and
observations. This is the subject of our study.

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 STANDARDS AND SUGGESTED METHODS
Rock mechanics has not yet advanced to the stage where testing and observational
techniques can be rigorously standardized. However, the International Society for
Rock Mechanics (ISRM) and the American Society for Testing and Materials
(ASTM) have published "designations" and "suggested methods” for laboratory
and field testing and for description of rock materials. Several of these are listed
with the references at the ends of the appropriate chapters. See Brown (1981) under
“BOOKS” above. For up-to-date information about standardization in rock me-
chanics, communicate directly with ISRM, Commission on Standardization,
Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil, Avenida do Brasil, P-1799, Lisbon,
Portugal; and with ASTM, Committee D-18 on Soil and Rock for Engineering
Purposes, 1916 Race Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103.

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