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Adapting Hoek-Brown Failure Criterion to Rockfill Material and Its Use in 3D Analysis of a Waste Dump Facility

Tailings and Mine Waste Conference (2023 : Vancouver, B.C.); University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

The strength envelopes developed by Leps (1970) have become the industry standard for the design of rockfill embankments, and his chart is widely used, as recommended by both the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) and the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). Since Leps’s study does not provide a direct relationship for failure envelopes, most practitioners use discrete readings from his chart and perform a stability analysis of rockfills accordingly. However, a mathematically expressed strength model (failure criterion) is necessary for advanced numerical analyses, such as finite element or finite difference analyses. Leps’s study is based on the fact that the relationship between shear strength and normal stress is not linear for geomaterials, especially granular materials such as rockfills. The Generalized Hoek-Brown (GHB) failure criterion is one of the nonlinear strength models widely used in rock mechanics. Several software packages developed for numerical analysis of geotechnical problems offer this failure criterion by default. Therefore, if a relationship between Leps’s strength envelopes and the GHB failure criterion is developed, it can be possible to perform complex numerical analyses of the structures with rockfill material. The motivation of the authors to study this subject is to perform analyses of rockfill embankments and waste rocks placed in such locations that simple two-dimensional analyses cannot represent the actual conditions. A potentially acid-generating waste dump facility designed by the authors is an excellent example of such problems because it is located in a highly seismic region of Turkey and a narrow valley with relatively complex geotechnical characteristics. This article presents a practical relationship for modeling rockfill materials and presents a 3- dimensional stability analysis of a waste dump facility using this relationship.

Text

2023-12-08

Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86781

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/