Abstract
In underground construction it is important to obtain a discontinuities' model of rocks for simulations to evaluate rock stability around the working space and fluid flow in the rocks. In this study, an uniaxial compression test on a prism-shaped specimen of granite was conducted to develop a more feasible modeling method of cracks in rocks based on AE (acoustic emission) monitoring data and the fractal properties of the AE source distribution. 1. From this experiment, it was found that the AE source distribution was fractal and that the relationship between amplitude and frequency of AE was also fractal. 2. Crack distributions in the specimen and on the surface were both fractal. 3. A 3-D crack distribution model was constructed using AE monitoring data obtained from the experiment. In this model, the crack was described by a disk, and the fractal dimension of sectional lines that appeared on the surface of a specimen was adjusted to coincide with the dimension of lineaments extracted from a real crack image of the same surface of the specimen by correcting the AE parameters. That is, the relative AE energy for each event were altered iteratively until both fractal dimensions were matched. It is thought that this new modeling method for cracks in rocks can be directly applied to field studies of underground construction in the future.
