Stability analysis of rock blocks around a tunnel using a statistical joint modeling technique

Abstract

A three-dimensional statistical joint modeling technique was used to analyze the stability of rock blocks around a tunnel. The rock blocks generated from the joints and the tunnel were analyzed for their volume, height, perimeter, safety factor, and probability of occurrence. All these procedures were programmed into the computer program BLOCSTAB. The characteristics of rock block occurrence due to the variation of joint persistence Ždiameter., orientation and volumetric frequency were investigated. The rock block stability around a storage cavern of liquefied petroleum gas in Korea was analyzed as a case study. Here, the joints were assumed to follow the Baecher disk model for their shape and location, and their orientations were modeled by the Fisher distribution. The joint diameter distribution was estimated by using the window sampling method recently developed by Song and Lee.