Evaluation of long-term stability for rock slope by means of acoustic emission technique

Protections of rock slope are only conducted for a limited number of unstable slopes depending annually on the importance and the budget allocation. Accordingly the remaining unprotected slopes should be secured in one way or another until the protection is made. Evaluation of long-term rock stability becomes thus an urgent and important issue to assure infrastructures including public traffic and residential districts surrounding the slope. Rock failure is known as a transient failure process, whereas there might be a deformation process in which micro-scale fracture develops macro-scale fracture. Acoustic emission (AE) is a technique providing crucial information on a variety of fracture behavior as elastic waves, generated due to the deformation. In the paper, essential aspects when performing AE monitoring for evaluating rock slope stability are methodically described. A prospective method to install AE sensors into the rock slope (WEAD) is introduced, followed by a successful application using WEAD with the actual rock slope. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.