Estimation of Density Distribution of Rock Mass by Geostatistics

Abstract

Alteration, which weakens rock mass and reduces the dry density, is one of the essential subjects in the foundation engineering. Case study has been carried out in which the alteration zone was to be grasped by the estimation of the density with the mean of geostatistics. The distribution of the dry density in whole mass was estimated from measured data of limited numbers of cores bored vertically and compared with the data measured horizontally. The result shows that the shape of histogram of estimated density was very similar to the measured one, while the density itself was not estimated precisely. Therefore, the geostatistics is able to be applyed to estimate many properties of rock mass other than alteration.