INFLUENCE OF AXIAL STRESS AND DILATANCY ON ROCK TUNNEL STABILITY. CLOSURE

A closure of a discussion of a paper with the aforementioned title by D.F. Hambley, published in this journal (Volume 123, Number 8, August 1997), is presented. The paper was also published in this journal (Volume 122, Number 2, February 1996). The closure answers the following concerns of the discusser: the use of biaxial and intermediate-principal-stress-independent failure criteria for investigating the influence of intermediate principal stress is not appropriate, the assumed stress field for the analysis is too simple, the method of determining the shear strength parameters in the failure zone is not presented, the notation in the finite-element code is not consistent with notation used in other equations, and some of the equations require further elaboration.