Effect of Joint Roughness and Infill Thickness on Shear Characteristics of Rock Mass

The joint planes in fractured rock mass will reduce the tensile strength and shear strength of rock mass, which has a decisive influence on the deformation and failure mode of engineering rock mass. Furthermore, infill also exists between the joint surfaces, which will also affect the shear characteristics of the joint. A method of importing standard joint profile into PFC2D was proposed, and a series of numerical simulation tests were carried out to study the effect of joint roughness and infill thickness on the shear characteristics of joints. The numerical results revealed that rock bolts profoundly improved the shear strength of the infilled rock joints, enhanced the toughness of the joint surface, increased the number of micro-cracks, and made the dilatation more obvious. The shear stress and the normal displacement of unbolted or bolted infilled rock joints increased with increasing the joint roughness and decreasing the infill thickness. The maximum horizontal compression stress in the middle of the bolt gradually increased with the increase of joint roughness coefficient. Different roughness has different effects on the number of micro-cracks in the sample. The number of total cracks and tensile cracks of the bolted and unbolted specimens increased with the increase of joint roughness coefficient, while the shear cracks remained almost the same. Through the study of the coupling effect of joint roughness and infill thickness on peak shear stress, results can be obtained as follows. The unbolted samples are highly sensitive to JRC changes. The greater the infill thickness, the greater the sensitivity of unbolted samples to JRC changes. The reinforcement effect of the bolt will strengthen the meshing strength between the joint surface and the filling material; that is, the meshing strength is positively correlated with joint roughness and negatively correlated with filling thickness.

Automated summary

The joint planes in fractured rock mass have a significant influence on the deformation and failure mode of engineering rock mass. The effect of joint roughness and infill thickness on the shear characteristics of joints was studied through numerical simulation tests. The results showed that rock bolts improved the shear strength of infilled rock joints, increased the number of micro-cracks, and made the dilatation more obvious. The shear stress and normal displacement of unbolted or bolted infilled rock joints increased with increasing joint roughness and decreasing infill thickness.