Analysis and determination of the behavioral mechanism of rock bridges using experimental and numerical modeling of non-persistent rock joints

Abstract Presence of rock bridges (RB) in natural non-persistent discontinuity sets is an effective factor on the stability of rock structures. Investigations show that the bearing capacity of jointed rocks is changed with variation of different joint parameters. Therefore, in order to investigate the effect of parameters such as contact area and number of rock bridges, normal load, angle, length, and number of joints on shear strength of non-persistent rock joints and also to recognize the interaction of these parameters on the mechanical behavior of joints, experimental design methods of Taguchi and central composite design (CCD) were used for the sample generation, testing and numerical modeling. The effective parameters on the shear strength of jointed samples were obtained based on the previous studies. Using the Taguchi method, 16 samples were tested at CNL condition and the effect of parameters such as normal stress, number, and area of rock bridges was investigated. To evaluate other joints parameters, 30 experiments were designed using CCD method and examined using numerical modeling. Using the analysis of variance (ANOVA), it was found that the obtained models are statistically significant. According to the results of ANOVA, the area of rock bridges and the angle of joints showed the highest and the lowest effect on shear strength of coplanar and non-coplanar jointed samples, respectively. The results displayed that the dominant failure for planar non-persistent joints is pure shear and a combination of tensile and shear cracks is created from the both tips of adjacent joints. Moreover, it was found that the dominant failure of non-coplanar joints is the combination of shear and tension. Bonded particle model (BPM) and smooth joint model (SJM) were also applied for numerical modeling. A new method was considered for applying SJ to the models, which solved the interlocking problem during the test.