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Correlation of Soft Rock Properties

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Abstract

Soft rocks are a critical type of natural material, due to their low strength, and sometimes problematic behavior in engineering works, since they may crumble, swallow, slake, contract, and so on. It is not uncommon do adopt too much conservative parameters for these types of rocks, due to the insufficient knowledge of their properties. Improving their knowledge may lead to adopting more realistic parameters with advantages to the economy of the projects. For the while, there is not a characteristic property that could be taken as an index property from which several other ones could be related to assess the characteristic behavior of a soft rock.

The main aim of this chapter is to present the diverse correlations between different physical and mechanical properties of intact rocks, including soft rocks, to allow the assessment of other properties once one or more of them is determined. It is proposed that absorption could be an interesting index property for soft rocks.

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Kanji, M.A., Leão, M. (2020). Correlation of Soft Rock Properties. In: Kanji, M., He, M., Ribeiro e Sousa, L. (eds) Soft Rock Mechanics and Engineering . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29477-9_14

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