Abstract
The long-term strength of rock masses presents a strong correlation with the creep behavior, but its correlation with stress relaxation behavior has been rarely investigated. In this work, the kinematic interactions of discontinuities in terms of asperity crushing and/or breakage and viscous deformation are stated governing the fundamental relaxation behaviors of discontinuities. The correlation between stress relaxation behaviors and long-term strength is discussed, accordingly, iso-stress cyclic loading (ICL) method considering the Kaiser effect is proposed to conduct stress relaxation tests and verify such correlation. Test results on artificial discontinuities show that the proposed method could well determine the long-term strength. The linear fitting curves of the obtained long-term strengths for different discontinuities present a good agreement with Coulomb’s shear strength formula with decreased internal friction angle and cohesion forces, compared to conventional shear strengths. Meanwhile, the normal deformation of the tested discontinuity under ICL demonstrates that the viscous deformation bears a relatively smaller contribution to the stress relaxation.
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Abbreviations
- ICL:
-
Isostress cyclic loading
- \(\varepsilon_{\text{e}}\) :
-
Elastic strain
- \(\varepsilon_{\text{p}}\) :
-
Plastic strain
- \(\varepsilon_{\text{v}}\) :
-
Viscous strain
- \(\dot{\varepsilon }_{\text{e}}\) :
-
Elastic strain rate
- \(\dot{\varepsilon }_{\text{p}}\) :
-
Plastic strain rate
- \(\dot{\varepsilon }_{\text{v}}\) :
-
Viscous strain rate
- \(\sigma_{\text{r}}\) :
-
Relaxed stress
- t :
-
Time
- \(\sigma_{0}\) :
-
Initially applied stress
- \(\sigma_{\text{s}}\) :
-
Residual stress
- \(\sigma_{\text{rn}}\) :
-
Relaxed stress at n cyclic times
- JRC:
-
Joint roughness coefficient
- \(\sigma_{\text{n}}\) :
-
Normal stress
- \(\tau\) :
-
Shear strength
- \(\tau_{\text{s}}\) :
-
Applied shear stress
- \(\tau_{\infty }\) :
-
Long-term shear strength
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the funding for this research from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41602302; 41372295). In addition, the authors would like to express their appreciation to Professor Tomochika TOKUNAGA of the University of Tokyo for his kind suggestions to this paper.
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Liu, A., Lin, W. & Jiang, J. Investigation of the Long-Term Strength Properties of a Discontinuity by Shear Relaxation Tests. Rock Mech Rock Eng 53, 831–840 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-019-01945-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00603-019-01945-y